Life Together - Week #5

Because I posted a comment this past week in response to a question about the "ministry of bearing" (from chapter 4 of Life Together), I will skip over that section.

There are so many wonderful statements made by Bonhoeffer in this chapter called "Ministry" that I think I'll just put out several quotes for you to consider:

• Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.

Under the topic of the "ministry of holding one's tongue," the author says:

• ...it must be a decision rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him. This prohibition does not include the personal word of advice and guidance...But to speak about a brother covertly is forbidden, even under the cloak of help and good will...
• Where this discipline of the tongue is practiced...each individual will make a matchless discovery. He will be able to cease from constantly scrutinizing the other person, judging him, condemning him...Now he can allow the brother to exist as a completely free person, as God made him to be. His view expands and, to his amazement, for the first time he sees, shining above his brethren, the richness of God's creative glory.
• ...God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image.
• But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified.

The ministry of meekness:

• Only he who lives by the forgiveness of his sin in Jesus Christ will rightly think little of himself.
• If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all...

The ministry of listening:

• ...he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life...
• ...the ministry of listening has been committed to (Christians) by Him who is Himself the greatest listener...We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

The ministry of authority:

• Genuine authority realizes that it can exist only in the service of Him who alone has authority.
• Pastoral authority can be attained only by the servant of Jesus who seeks no power of his own.

This is pretty sketchy but profound insights to chew on. Lord, continue to expand our hearts and minds to understand what we can only know in You by Your Spirit. Thank You that You love to work with us! We love You...

Next week we will finish Life Together with chapter 5, "Confession and Communion." Have a blessed week in Him with His family!

Life Together - Week #4

(Obviously my posting didn't work properly yesterday, so I'll try again!)

I trust you have had a good week of experiencing the grace of God in Jesus!

We've just finished chapter three of Life Together, which is about "the day alone." Bonhoeffer discusses in this chapter some spiritual disciplines for our personal journey with God, and as in all the other chapters, there's way too much in it to touch on everything. So I'll comment on just a little of this chapter.

In my walk with God, He has discovered to me that there's a great difference between living and moving in Him and living and moving in my own natural life. I am more of a private person by nature, but the Lord has taught me that this doesn't mean that I'm naturally good at practicing Christian solitude. The Christian discipline of solitude is purposeful, intended to be time with God alone, not simply being alone.

And I love Bonhoeffer's teaching that we can't be alone healthily if we don't know how to be in fellowship with other believers. He adds that we don't do fellowship healthily if we don't know how to be alone with God: "Only in the fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to live rightly in the fellowship."

Along these lines, he goes on to address the need to practice silence..."this is something that needs to be practiced and learned, in these days when talkativeness prevails. Real silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness."

In my personal experience the discipline of silence has been powerful to teach me when and how to speak. I have become more sensitive to the nudges of the Holy Spirit when I'm talking too much or when I should be talking rather than be silent.

Although I did an extreme version of silence and solitude this past January in which I literally separated myself from people and everyday stimuli for a month, you don't have to practice this discipline in such a way. A couple of ways that we can do this in the normal course of life are the following:

• Take a few minutes out of the day to be silent before the Lord and His Word.
• Take a day (or weekend) off and get away to a retreat center or just away from your normal setting to a quiet spot, and there commune with the Lord.
• Andrew Murray suggests setting apart a month in which you don't talk - by this he means that you govern your mouth to only speak what you must in order to live your day; inother words, keeping alert to not speak carelessly every little thing that comes to your mind to say.

Many years ago I took up this suggestion of Andrew Murray's and was very surprised at what I discovered about myself. Whereas I had thought I wasn't strongly opinionated about things (because I didn't talk outwardly about them), I discovered that this discipline brought to light how much inner talking I did and how opinionated I was! The Lord was there to help me then to begin to listen more to Him and align my inner heart with His truth and passions.

Bonhoeffer goes on to talk about how meditation on the Scriptures naturally leads to prayer, and how true this is!

Intercession for others flows naturally out of meditation on the Word and personal prayer. The author says something that's so true about Christian fellowship: "A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me." I wonder if there would be less backbiting and criticism of our brothers and sisters with whom we live and work if we took more time to pray together and to pray for one another...

Finally, Bonhoeffer concludes the chapter with a wonderful and terrifying truth that I am convinced of myself: "The individual must realize that his hours of aloneness react upon the community. In his solitude he can sunder and besmirch the fellowship, or he can strengthen and hallow it. Every act of self-control of the Christian (when alone) is also a service to the fellowship. On the other hand, there is no sin in thought, word, or deed, no matter how personal or secret, that does not inflict injury upon the whole fellowship."

John Donne wrote: "No man is an island..." Your daily obedience strengthens me as does my obedience strengthen you, and the negative side to that is true as well. This isn't meant for condemnation but bears out once again how impossible Christianity is without Jesus living His life in and through me, and so we keep reaching for Him and clinging to Him continually.

May the enabling grace of the Lord Jesus rest on you this week. Lord, thank You that it is You in us who is our hope of becoming like you - increase in us by Your Spirit this week, in Jesus' name.

Next week we'll cover chapter four in which the author speaks of various types of ministry that go on in the Body of Christ. Remember that in two weeks we will be starting the new book, Living in the Freedom of the Spirit by Tom Marshall.

Life Together - Week #3

The last half of chapter two of Life Together talks of fellowshipping over meals together and working and praying together throughout the day. Bonhoeffer is speaking in the context of a community of believers that lives together in one location, but I believe the principles can apply to the family of God that lives scattered but in fellowship together.

There were a couple of things that struck me in this portion. One is when the author talks of the “three kinds of table fellowship that Jesus keeps with His own: daily fellowship at table, the table fellowship of the Lord’s Supper, and the final table fellowship in the Kingdom of God.” He then makes a powerful statement about these times of fellowship that, again, sets Christian community apart from human community: “…in all three the one thing that counts is that ‘their eyes were opened, and they knew him.’”

To know Jesus in the midst of our fellowshipping over a meal is so sweet! Each time we break bread together, it can be a time of our eyes being open to see more of the Man Jesus if we do it by faith. I personally believe that God really enjoys being with His people as they eat together!

Another part of the end of this chapter that I’ll comment on is where Bonhoeffer speaks of the sanctifying power of daily work: “…in work the Christian learns to allow himself to be limited by the task…The passions of the flesh die in the world of things. But this can only happen where the Christian breaks through the ‘it’ to the ‘Thou,’ which is God, who bids him work and makes that work a means of liberation from himself…Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer…”

The discipline of prayer at the beginning of the day and then pausing periodically throughout the day to breathe a simple prayer of love and thanks to God is such a heart-awaking discipline. In time this practice begins to lift us out of our tiny, self-focused world to another plane in God in which we become increasingly aware of Him and of His love for others around us. This practice bit by bit helps us break through the “it” of the task to the “Thou,” allowing us to see what’s going on around us in a whole different light. God is with us right now and right here! What a difference that awareness makes to the daily work!

I’ll end with two more short quotes from this portion:
“The prayer of the morning will determine the day."
"The organization and distribution of our time will be better for having been rooted in prayer.”
When Allen Hood was here last year at our college, he challenged the young missionary trainees by saying that how you start and end your day will determine how you walk through the day.

Lord, we are Yours, and You are with us right now! Thank You for grace to pray and live and work together IN YOU…Holy Spirit, help us to increasingly practice Your presence until we break through the “it” of the task to You, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.


Chapter three has some wonderful things in it about solitude and silence and community…note the warning Bonhoeffer gives related to solitude and to community. Have a blessed week! (Take note further down of the reading schedule for our next book and the title of the book after that...)

Living Together - Week #2

Thanks for the input from some of you! The Lord bless you this week...

I have two main comments on the first part of chapter two, in which Bonhoeffer deals with corporate praying and worshiping, etc.

The first comment is that I was excited to read Bonhoeffer's citing of Oetinger's exposition of the Psalms, because it confirmed what the Holy Spirit made real to me during a month of silence and solitude I had this past January. During that time I chose the Psalms as the part of Scripture to spend my month in, and the reason I did was that I wanted to know more about Jesus' prayer life. Well, I had remembered reading a couple of authors who said that the Psalms was probably Jesus' prayer book and the means by which He learned to pray. As I thought on that, it hit me that if that was the case and if Jesus' response to His disciples' desire to learn to pray (Luke 11:1) was the "Lord's Prayer", then it seemed obvious to me that what we call "the Lord's Prayer" would be a summary of the prayers of the Psalms! That's what led me to devote my month-long sabbatical to the book of the Psalms...

So I was delighted to read this from Bonhoeffer as he spoke about Oetinger's study of the Psalms:
"...The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word...What he (Oetinger) had discerned was that the whole sweep of the Book of Psalms was concerned with nothing more nor less than the brief petitions of the Lord's Prayer."

In light of what I'm discovering in the Psalms now that I see them in this light, I heartily recommend the reading/praying of the Psalms with the understanding that they are first of all about Jesus, but that they can, of course, apply to us who are in Him too. It's really fun to read them with Jesus in mind...(a beautiful book that highlights this is Patrick Reardon's book, Christ in the Psalms.)

The other observation I'd like to make from this chapter is his words about "singing the new song." This is something the Holy Spirit is awakening now more than ever, and we're starting to teach our missionary trainees at Bethany more about singing the Scriptures so that the truth penetrates their inner being more effectively. As I am practicing singing to the Lord spontaneously, I'm finding my heart more and more unlocked, and it actually has a healing effect on my mind so that my brain is functioning better. The beauty of this is that the Lord loves our songs to Him whether we have a lovely voice (as men judge) or not!

Lord Jesus, we want to see Your beauty...thank you for the means of grace that you give us weak humans to experience you in truth. Holy Spirit, You Who love Jesus best, show Him to us in our simple and fumbling spiritual disciplines so that we live and move in Him with open and tender hearts. We love You, Lord!

For next week, we'll continue and finish chapter two, ok? Blessings on you!