Dear Elim Grace,
It’s easy as disciples in today’s individualized culture to lose sight of the ABC’s of our discipleship. The fundamentals of the call of Jesus upon our lives. Peter obeyed when Jesus said to him, “You must follow me” (John 21). “You” singular. Years later Peter would write to the church to remind them “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:19). “You” plural. Community as a people is fundamental to calling as a disciple.
We may be the lost sheep Jesus finds wandering, but upon laying us on His shoulder He returns us to the fold that includes 99 other sheep (Luke 15). We may be alone when He saves us, but He doesn’t save us to be alone. As our Good Shepherd He brings us into His fold. Or, to use a favorite picture of Paul’s, Christ brings us into His body. We are united to Him, and in Him to others as members of His body. To separate ourselves from community is to sever ourselves from growth and health and maturity in Christ.
For the body of Christ to function as it should, there are some key practices and disciplines to our discipleship that must be present. Confession, forgiveness, and repentance of sins. We need these to thrive together. And these same practices and disciplines carry over into our life together as husbands and wives. Or they should.
Too often as husbands and wives we fail to come together to confess our sins, to forgive each other, and to repent before God. This may happen not because doing so is unimportant, but because doing so is not an engrained or learned way of living. It’s not something we practice.
It’s easy to think of ourselves as disciples in the church or in the world, but not always as disciples in a marriage.
Alone before God we may pray and ask the Holy Spirit to search us. The Holy Spirit may convict us of some sin in our lives. We ask God for His forgiveness. This is necessary. But we are also told to “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” (James 5:16) Within the context of a loving community, marriage should be where obedience to this first plays out for husbands and wives. The practices and disciplines of our discipleship are not excluded from our marriage. They are central to it, since before we are anything else, we are disciples of Jesus Christ.
To confess, forgive, repent is an act of vulnerability and humility. It will most certain be hard. And it will noticeably feel awkward…in the beginning.
Praying together as husband and wife may not be something we do every day, but neither should it be always awkward when one asks the other to “pray for me”. A decision to repent of sin together before God may be painful, but it should not be more than we are willing to bear out of love. These precious moments together reveal in a practical, concrete way our heart’s belief and our mouth’s confession that Jesus is Lord. That He is the center and foundation of our discipleship and, therefore, of our marriage.
Jesus should be as real and present to Alissa and I together in our marriage (and in our home) as He is to us individually in our church. It should be as normal to raise our hands in worship Sunday morning as it is to hold each other’s hand in a moment of honest prayer Monday night.
Pastor Jonathan