Unity in a community
What is necessary for us Christians to live a true life? How can we achieve unity among us? This is the most needful and, at the same time, the most difficult thing. Often it is not possible to speak about the problems of others in the community or to point to the root: “Look, you have such fault, you need to do something about it. You cling to this thing and attitude, and you deprive yourself of 90% of the blessing and all the graces which God has given you.” If you say this to someone, the old self (i.e. our corrupt nature) reacts by taking offence and fleeing both from the community and from Christ. What’s that? The problem is, too, that we are mostly under pressure, exposed to a spiritual fight, and so it is not possible to tell a brother about his faults because he would not have the strength to continue to fight. You must overlook it – yes, he made a mistake, but now we can’t deal with this problem since we are in a fight. God has put us into this situation and we humbly admit our weakness as well as the fact that it shouldn’t be so, but we have to wait until the time is ripe.
Serving others, you need to be very careful and learn to be sensitive to the Spirit of God so as to perform spiritual operation. At the same time, you yourself must allow Jesus to perform an operation on you through your brethren. We need to trust each other. You need to know that those who do you this spiritual service do so because they love you, that your brethren in the community love you, that the community needs you, that God needs you. And you need to be aware: Yes, I have these positive traits; this in particular is my positive trait and everybody will admit it; but I have negative traits too and therefore I want to undergo spiritual operation – to let this “tumour” be removed – and I want this wound to heal slowly. I want it so as to work for God 95% and not 5%. We usually work like a steam locomotive – 5% effect, puffing and whistling… Yes, we do work, but unfortunately… If we want to live for Christ 95%, we have to repent in earnest, both individually and in the community.
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