Accountability
Posted On Monday, 20 August 2007 at at 8:22:00 pm by LisaMake this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. - James
I admire the church in Acts for many reasons. Despite its faults I really like the community that the early church had. True community meant living together, performing the odd miracle, communal living (by some) and a real commitment to face matters of conflict head on. In doing so the early church really had a great desire to keep each other accountable to truely following the gospel (see Acts 15/Galatians 2 for more)
Many modern church communities have lost much of these basic accountability principles. In our desire to be 'accepting and loving' (which I am all for) we tend to ignore many unbiblical behaviours of our brothers and sisters and don't keep each other accountable. We smile , or we cringe, rather than lovingly confront. We laugh at someones actions that are hurtful or we cry on the inside, but we do little to confront the issue at hand.
I recently heard someone say that they wouldn't confront a Christian brother or sister unless a situation was 'really bad'. I have to ask: Does that mean you will ignore the 10 repeated things that lead up to the situation before it gets really bad (and conversely the 10 or more people they could be affecting by their actions)? If we are meant to be becoming more like Jesus every day, how is waiting for someone to get worse helping them do that?
Do we truely wish to keep each other accountable in the pursuit of holiness?
Do we truely know what is going on in those in our christian community?
Some points to ponder from post secret:
Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. - James
Very thought-provoking post. Accountability is so key to the Christian life, but we tend to only think so when we're the ones holding other people accountable and not the other way around. :)
It takes a lot of prayer and humility to know when and how to lovingly keep one another accountable. Our human tendency is, like you said, ignore or become finger pointers in order to deflect attention away from our own sin.