The Redemptive Tension of Sharing Life

Our mission is sharing life.  We use that phrase without qualification because we want to maintain the tension resident within it.  We share our lives and we share his life.  Both must happen simultaneously with equal emphasis.  Without a commitment to share our lives (that is, to blow our personal agendas and preferences to live as one) we have no credible witness of the gospel before the watching world.  Jesus said that everyone would know we are his disciples by our love.  1 John 3:16 says that this love lays down its life for the other.  If I’m in a crisis while my sister is also suffering, whose problems should be my first concern?  How could we tell the world of a savior who died on a cross and reject the cross to be borne for the sake of his people?

This line of questioning presumes buy in to the mission of sharing his life with a world on death row.  Without a commitment to share his life, sharing our lives would have no basis.  The infusion of his life into our individual hearts and the pursuant desire to pass it on to others enables us to love each other.  We love because he first loved us.  When we tell a wanderer of his love, our appreciation of his love for us grows.

Further, when the wanderer accepts Christ’s life, he will need a context in which to fully experience the ongoing practical giving and receiving of love that comes with the sharing of that life in community. The redemptive tension continues as the kingdom advances.

The bottom line becomes this: To share life we must be ready to drop what we’re doing, cancel our plans and let our interests go unattended. In other words, to share our lives we must lose them trusting Christ’s words that only in doing so will we find them. And having found them we must invite others to do the same.