the importance of "with"

And I pray that your love will have deep roots. I pray that it will have a strong foundation. May you have power with all God's people to understand Christ's love (Ephesians 3:17b-18).

Recently another high-profile pastor was revealed to be living a double life. Sadly, his story is just one in a long line of stories about spiritual leaders and pastors who have had very public failures.

What do we make of this?

First, it is a good reminder that the potential for human evil and failure is in all of our hearts. Pastor's are not exempt- it is just that because of what a pastor does and stands for, he is under more scrutiny and therefore his failure is much more scandalous. So when we hear of these kinds of things we say, "there except by the grace of God go I!" Like Paul we say, "those things I don't want to do I do...wretched man that I am!"

As Francis Schaeffer once said, "he who thinks he has arrived, never will."

Second, it is important also for us to remind ourselves that we are only as sick as our secrets. There is a reason that God calls us to live in fellowship. Biblical community is absolutely necessary for a godly life.

In the passage above, Paul said, "I pray that you will have power WITH all the saints". This is an important distinction. The reason it is easy for even people who look the part and attend church to live in hiddenness and not change is because they are not truly on the journey with people who can challenge them with the "How are you- really?" question.

In American Christianity we are often guilty of defining the Christian experience as something lived out in isolation. We talk about a "personal relationship with God," or we claim, "My religion is a personal matter, between me and God" or "I keep my religion to myself".

What these cliche's have in common is that none is a Biblical concept.

The truth is that Scripture rarely contemplates faith living without community. It is true that each of us is personally responsible for his or her own salvation and spiritual maturity. None of us will stand before God and give account for anyone else. But the teaching of Scripture is that to be "in Christ" is to be "in His body," in Biblical community.

It is in Biblical community that we bear each other's burdens (Gal. 6:5), hold each other accountable (Heb. 10:24), encourage one another (Phil. 2:24), serve one another (Gal. 5:13), confess our sins to one another (James 5:16) and love one another as Christ has loved us (John 13:34).

In fact, what we find in Scripture is that God created us for community. The one thing God said was "not good" in the creation event was that man was alone.

"Incompleteness", in other words, is directly associated with "aloneness". We are incomplete in our isolation. To be alone is to be unhealthy. The worst punishment for a prisoner is to be put in solitary confinement because it has the most torturous and debilitating effect on the emotions. God created us emotionally and spiritually to live life together. There is, in fact, a direct correlation between physical and emotional disease and isolation.

Condemnation in the literal sense is to be isolated from God- to exist without the full beam of God's love. Hell is eternal separation from God. We create our own personal hell as we isolate ourselves from His love and the love of others. death is seperation- first our body and spirit separate and then our bodies "de-compose".

To be isolated is to decompose, and the more we separate from God the sicker we become. All of us know people who isolate themselves from others and from God and the more they are apart from Him and others, the more they come apart. Sadly, this is the peril of many pastors, who feel as if they must stand alone and hide their weakness.

We must not forget that we are wired for community. So, the church is not merely a place you go to, it is a movement you are a part of and that you participate in WITH others.

It is not a building in which isolated and alone people gather together to pat each other on the back and empower their varying degrees of aloneness and isolation and denial. It is a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit, lived out in Biblical community.