Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You're Irrelevant and Extreme by Gabe Lyons

Author:Gabe Lyons
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: REL070000
ISBN: 0801013178
Publisher: Baker Books
Published: 2016-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

12

Race and Prejudice

Good faith Christians admit their racial bias, see the image of God in others, and build diverse friendships.

If we get relationships wrong, little else matters.

The Christian God is a relational God. He exists relationally within his Triune self—as Father, Spirit, and Son—but God’s actions in the world are also driven by a mission to reconcile his relationship with humanity. He was so intent on this mission that he emptied himself by becoming the “other”—a human being.

We see a similar drawing close to the other in the way Jesus discipled the Twelve. He chose followers and friends with different experiences and lifestyles. Their differences—from fisherman to tax collector, hotheaded to cool and calculating—reflected God’s mosaic history of forging unlikely relationships to accomplish his mission.

If you have a few years of life experience under your belt, you know that human relationships are one of the primary places God does his good work of redemption and re-creation, sanctifying us into the people we were created to be. Relationships are the engine of God’s transformative work in us. And it is often when those relationships are most difficult, when the differences between us are most profound, that the deepest of God’s sanctifying, reconciling work is done.

How good faith Christians engage in relationships says more about the truth of what we believe than all our well-argued apologetics or carefully worded doctrinal statements.

How do we respond to those who live and think differently? Do we see ourselves as better and smarter? Are we open to learning lessons we’ve never even imagined about our world and ourselves?

Good faith does not prioritize relationship with God over and against relationships with one another. It reveals relationship with God in relationships with others.

I like to be a part of solving problems. Wisdom warns that no one person has an infallible perspective on any situation. Proverbs reminds us, “Where there is no counsel, the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety” (Prov. 11:14 NKJV). Because I don’t have all the answers, I convene others who might. That urge to bring people and ideas is the impetus behind Q. It’s common for me to respond to pressing issues in the church or the broader culture by inviting a group of thoughtful people with different points of view and takes on reality into a room to listen to one another and talk about those issues. Some already have relationships with one another, while others embark on new and unlikely friendships. In either case, our guards are let down. We roll up our sleeves and try to find a way through together.

For me, the need to convene in pursuit of wisdom never felt more urgent than in 2014 and 2015, when race once again rose to the surface of our national consciousness. Of course for many it has been a front-and-center reality for their entire lives, but in the last few years, many Americans began to understand that the questions of racial reconciliation were not as settled as we imagined.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.