My friends...I implore you to share first in prayer and then with a trusted friend, the thoughts your are thinking about this day. Tell someone you love and trust about your struggles or joys and have them pray with you. Is something troubling you? Are you worried? Or are you excited about some fabulous news? Rejoice and praise him!
All of us are being tested and tried, to refine our spirits and to shape us into the image of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is remarkable how different these trials may be...the forms they take and the degrees of difficulty that they reach. God's extends to us His sovreign grace and views us through the cleansing blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, His Son. I am glad for it.
I write to you today because of how important I feel it is to share and confide in one another when we are experiencing growing pains or troubles, these trials and temptations that we must deal with on a daily basis. We need to lift one another up in prayer, free of judgement, and to encourage one another in our daily struggles.
While it is not necessary to broadcast our sins, struggles and temptation to the entire body, I do believe it is important to have spiritual accountability with a mentor or within a small group. It may be most comfortable to share within a group of the same gender for some issues, other issues among couples, may be handled in couples counseling. What I do know is that we cannot experience growth without successful negotiation of areas of difficulty in our lives. What I advocate is ongoing godly counseling and accountability within a mentoring partnership.
We live in a very individualistic society where it is traditionally inappropriate or uncomfortable to share private struggles with anyone (even with other family members in some instances) especially in Christian circles where we consciously or unconsciouslly judge one another's piety on a regular basis. Imagine how difficult it must be to be a leader of anything in the church, to struggle with the sins and trials common to man, and NOT feel comfortable sharing your inner battles. It's very personal to share struggles, and it is human nature is to gossip. Therefore trust and confidence are essential elements of a sharing situation.
I cannot stress how important it is to establish a godly accountability relationship. I don't think it's healthy to pretend everything is sunshine and roses when it is not. I think this avoiding behavior leads to destructive outcomes. Without appropriate cleansing, reconcilliation and healing, an issue can bury you and those you love.
I think Satan would like nothing better than for us to isolate ourselves and to allow sins to control our lives, leading us to believe that our struggle with him or our own sins should be personal, isolating us from the prayers and support of the body of Christ. Placing this pressure on ourselves to fight exclusively against the devil, we give evil increasingly stronger footholds in our lives with every small concession we make in it's favor. That's how the devil operates. He erodes our resolve, one mite at a time.
That's why it's so important to build relationships with one another where we build eachother up and trust one another enough to know that if we share personal issues with one another we will receive the unconditional love and honesty that should be there when it's needed.
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