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Facing Reality with Jesus
[Bob's Blog]
04/01/2009
By Towell, Bob
I am preparing for our Study Group that will meet tonight. We are using David Watson's classic and blockbusting book on discipleship, Called and Committed. One of the chapters we are looking at tonight is Called to Community. David writes,
Jesus calls his disciples today to a life of realism, openness and honesty. Only when we take off our masks, when we are real with one another, when we walk in the light, as he is in the light, can we have true fellowship with him and each other....There is probably nothing which so shatters our fantasy dream world, helps us to come to terms with our true identity, and enables us to be real with each other, as genuine Christian community.
David goes on to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer(1906-1945), a German pastor, writer, and theologian, who spent the last two years of his life in a Nazis concentration camp before he was hanged in Flossenburg. David says some people join a fellowship with a fantasy dream about Christian community. About this, Bonhoeffer wrote:
God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves...God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight...When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship."
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