Theme: How We View Other Disciples
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
Discipleship is personal, but it is not personalistic. It always involves our relationships to others who also profess to be disciples. But are they disciples?
Theme: The Problem Explored
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
In the incident we are studying, the exorcist not only did what he did in Christ’s name and therefore in open allegiance to Christ. He was also effective in what he did, for he was actually casting out demons.
Theme: Cause of Dissension
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
I suppose that in the entire history of the church there has never been a division, however unnecessary or sordid, that has not been justified by some persons on spiritual grounds.
Theme: One Body, Many Gifts
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
There is only one way we will ever defeat this tendency to an improper narrowness in our view of Christian work, and that is to recover a vision of the greatness of the church as Christ’s body.
Theme: Are They with Us?
This week’s lessons remind us of the need to show unity in the gospel with other believers, including those who are different from us.
Scripture: Mark 9:33-40
Yesterday we looked at the first three varieties within the church. Today we look at the last two.
4. There is a variety of methods. When I wrote of “styles” a moment ago I was approaching this area.
Have you ever had trouble getting along with another Christian? Perhaps you found it difficult because the other person was unwilling to respond to you, or because of what you suspected was a failure in yourself. Many Christians have the same problem. In fact, even in the New Testament church at Philippi, two good friends of the Apostle Paul were having similar problems. And Paul gave them some good advice. I’m sure that his advice will be helpful to you, too.
Bishop Handley Moule, who is one of the great commentators on the book of Philippians, has written some wonderful words on this point of having the mind of Christ. He lived in the last century, and some of his language is a bit archaic. But he is so good and this is so practical that I want to share his thoughts with you.
To be humble, you need to stop thinking about yourself all the time. That’s what it means. You need to stop comparing yourself with your boss, the secretary who sits next to you, the other Sunday school teacher, or whoever it is who rubs you the wrong way. Instead, you need to think of what you can do to help that person, just as the Lord Jesus Christ did.
The third step in getting along with other Christians is to rejoice in the Lord. Paul says this in Philippians 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” Paul knew that if a Christian is rejoicing in God’s mercy and goodness to him, he is not so likely to be nit-picking with his fellow Christians. If your thoughts are filled with God, you will not be seeing another’s bad temper, laziness or unreliability, at least to the degree that you would if you were not doing this.
Have you ever noticed how many times he speaks of being “in the Lord Jesus Christ” in the first four verses of this chapter? Three times! And once he reminds the Philippians that “the Lord is at hand.” The solution is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is He who will do in the lives of yielded Christians what they might judge impossible. You can learn to get along with other Christians only as you surrender yourself to Christ and seek His will, as His Holy Spirit enters your life and begins to make you into the man or woman that he would have you be.
Now I’ve looked at these different verses from James because through them we can summarize the different teachings that the Bible has about temptation. When we summarize them, we see that there are two basic kinds of temptation: temptations from God, which are good (and it’s not even good to use that word; “testing” is a better word). And then there are temptations to sin, which are evil. This second kind of temptation, the temptation to sin, may be divided into temptations of the flesh, the world, and Satan. It is over these temptations that every believer must triumph. And therefore it’s these we must talk about in this study.
Anyone who is interested in the doctrine of the church and senses its importance must be a bit surprised to notice how little the word “church” actually occurs in the Bible. The word is not found in the Old Testament at all. The first time it occurs is in Matthew 16:18, then again in Matthew 18:17. But it is not in the other gospels. It is scattered throughout Acts, of course (about eighteen times), but it is only found five times in Romans, all in chapter 16 (vv. 1, 3, 5, 16, 23). There are quite a few instances in 1 Corinthians and Ephesians (eighteen and nine times respectively), but then the references become infrequent again.
Paul’s image is very helpful at this point. For when he speaks of the body of Christ, obviously he is speaking of those who belong to Christ, who are joined to Him in exactly the sense in which he speaks about our being joined to Christ in Romans 5 and elsewhere. This is a spiritual reality, invisible but supremely real.
There is a second important truth about the Church taught by Paul’s image of it as Christ’s body. Not only does that image define the Church as the community of those who have been joined to Christ. It also teaches that there is but one Church. That is, there are not multiple churches, even less mutually competing churches. There is but one Church, because Jesus has but one body.
Since we are part of a body with many members, what is the challenge we face in an individualistic age like ours? Well, the answer is not the ecumenical movement. Our task is not to create the unity of the body, above all not from the top down. The unity of the body is a given for those who are “in Christ.”
In this chapter, Joshua gives specific commands and a challenge to the 2½ eastern tribes who were going to dwell on the far side of the Jordan River. And the chapter contains an emotional parting and also an incident that grows out of that which is one of the most instructive incidents in the entire book.
Yesterday we saw the first two things Joshua tells the eastern tribes before going to their inheritance across the Jordan. There is a third item, as he says in chapter 22, verse 5, “But be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses, the servant of the Lord, gave to you to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, to obey His commands, to hold fast to Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and all your soul.”
But there’s something else. The war that looked like it was on the verge of starting did not begin at once. Rash people might have simply rushed to the Jordan and attacked the other people; but these Israelites didn’t do that. They were willing to fight for the Lord’s honor, but they were also willing to talk about the situation. So instead of just rushing off to the battle, they elected Phinehas, the son of Eliezer the priest, and ten of the chief men of Israel (one from each tribe) as a delegation. They dispatched this delegation to go down and meet with the others to see if it might not be possible to work to get some kind of peaceful resolution to this terrible error, as they assumed it to be.
The story has a happy ending. When this sort of thing happens in the church today, it doesn’t always have a happy ending, as we know. But it did in this situation. The tribes that had gone down to the Jordan explained what it was that they had done, and that the western tribes had simply misunderstood. First of all, those on the east were greatly shocked that what they had done could be interpreted that way. You have to pick that up from the language. When this great challenge to them was made, they responded by saying that God knows what their intentions were in building the altar, and they now want all Israel to know it too.
At the very end of this chapter, after the two bodies of people had parted, the Reubenites and the Gadites were standing there beside their memorial. And they called it “Witness,” because, as they said, “it is a witness between us that the Lord is God.” Isn’t it marvelous when we can look back on past history to things that have happened, and disputes we have had, and see the way in which it has been worked out according to Christian principles? Isn’t it wonderful to be able to say, “That’s a witness”? When things happen in that way, that’s a memorial. That’s a testimony to the fact that the Lord is God, and He is our God, and we follow Him.
Canadian Committee of The Bible Study Hour
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