Messy Makings in the Messianic Family – 1 Peter 5:1-7
October 31, 2021Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Speaker: Jerry Cisar
We live in a culture that is great at wedding planning, but terrible at marriage. That may provide an analogy for how we do church. We can market and plan a service down to the minute in such a way it guarantees to gather people but are terrible at doing life together as the family God intends.
God has made us into a people, but we do not naturally live as people of the Messiah in the Messiah’s ways. Whether leaders or followers (even those terms bring baggage with them), our tendency is to either abuse leadership positions or abuse leaders because both leaders and followers have a common pitfall: pride. God opposes the proud; no wonder church is such a mess.
Douglas Harink captures well the essence of this Sunday’s text (1 Peter 5:1-7) through these questions: “Does the common life and order of the messianic community correspond to and reflect the cruciform life and order of the Messiah? Or do its internal affairs more nearly mirror the envy, competition, and coercion of the wider Gentile society?”