What if we truly believed the promise of God to meet our repentance with grace? Could we dare to turn fully to our neighbors, to set aside our need to justify ourselves and to consider things from their perspective rather than our own?
This is what Paul advised Christians to do when facing the conflicts that inevitably arise between members of the body of Christ. Whether we are an eye, ear, hand or foot, Paul pointed out, our individual reputations matter much less than whether “members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25). In other words, repentance is not about recording “who’s right,” but about recovering the beloved community.
In a quote paraphrase from C.S. Lewis, author Rick Warren wrote that “true humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.” True repentance is not about building ourselves up or tearing ourselves down, but about putting ourselves in the right context: as members of the body of Christ, intimately connected to the rest of the body.
This message is excerpted from the Bible study “Turn, turn, turn: A time for faithful repentance” by Meghan Johnston Aelabouni in the October 2018 Gather magazine.
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