Renovation of the Heart
Transforming Our Social Dimension (1|4)
Pages 185-189
• Circles of Sufficiency
• The Reality of Rejection
• The Two Basic Forms of Evil in Relations to Others
• Understanding Assault and Withdrawl
• Spiritual Formation Is Necessarily Social
TOGETHER read the devotional and the scripture.
INDIVIDUALLY take notes in your journal on what stands out.
John 13:35 (NIV) “Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
1 John 2:7-11 (NIV) Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.
1 John 3:14-16 (NIV) We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
TOGETHER pray for one another.
INDIVIDUALLY answer the questions in your journal - process your devotional notes and pray.
Circles of Sufficiency
“The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others. As firmness of footing is a condition of walking and secure movement, so assurance of others being for us is the condition of stable, healthy living. - When the required type of ‘for-ness’ is adequately present, human ‘circles of sufficiency’ emerge. - These circles of sufficiency, natural and essential to human condition and so profoundly beautiful to behold, are always illusionary at the merely human level, and even the illusion itself is terrifyingly fragile.”
What “circles of sufficiency” have you enjoyed in your lifetime?
“Every human circle is part of a larger circle which also depends yet upon larger circles, while ever less intimate, are still crucial to making the inner circles possible. - Ultimately, every human circle is doomed to dissolution if it is not caught up in the life of the only genuinely self-sufficient circle of sufficiency, that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For that circle is the only one that is truly and totally self-sufficient. And all the broken circles must ultimately find their healing there, if anywhere.”
What are some occasions in “circles of sufficiency” when you experienced “completeness” in them? What are some occasions when you experienced when they were “broken”?
The Reality of Rejection
“Most people know a great deal about being rejected, being left out, or just not received, not welcome, not acceptable. As the parent-child relationship is perhaps the most perfect illustration of a circle of sufficiency in human life, so it is also the place where the deepest and most lasting wounds can be given. - Of course, severe wounds to our rootedness in others may also occur in later life. Failures of various kinds, real or imagined, can bring rejection or detachment from parents and significant figures. - They may leave us unconnected to others at levels of our souls where lack of nourishment from deep connections with others means spiritual starvation and loss of wholeness in our every dimension.”
How does rejection affect us? Why does it affect us as it does? Can you recall an occasion, perhaps as a child or youth, when you rejected someone? How did that person respond?
The Two Basic Forms of Evil in Relations to Others
“When we come to deal with spiritual formation of our social dimension, we have to start from woundedness. - The exact nature of the poison of sin in our social dimension is fairly easy to describe, though extremely hard to deal with. It has two forms. They are so closely related that they really are two forms of the same thing: of lovelessness, lack of proper regard and care for others. These two forms are assault or attack and withdrawal or ‘distancing.’ They are so much a part of ordinary human existence that most people think they are just ‘reality’ and never imagine that we could live without them. - If spiritual formation in Christ is to succeed, the power of these two forms of evil in our own lives - within ourselves - absolutely must be broken.”
Do assault and withdrawal cover the field of the evils people do to others? Think about the role these play in ordinary life. Is it possible to disagree with or correct others without assault or withdrawal?
Understanding Assault and Withdrawl
“We withdraw from someone when we regard their well-being and goodness as matters of indifference to us, or perhaps go so far as to despise them. We ‘don’t care.’ - Both assault and withdrawal primarily involve our relations to those close to us, those affected by what we do and who we are in the natural course of our living. - We always ‘distance’ ourselves from those we assault, and withdrawal - including threats or suggestions thereof - is nearly always a way of assaulting those we withdraw from. So we should think of the distinction between assault and withdrawal as only a matter of emphasis, useful for the understanding of how lovelessness works.”
Communication technology presents us with challenges and opportunities to either reject, “assault and withdrawal” or love our connections. What can you do to ensure that you are prioritizing and nurturing key relationships that make that kind of healing possible?
Spiritual Formation Is Necessarily Social
“Failure to love others as Jesus loves us chokes off the flow of the eternal kind of life that our whole human system cries out for. The old apostle minced no words: ‘He who hates,’ but simply, ‘He who does not love.’ The mere absence of love is deadly. It is withdrawal. - Love comes to us from God. That must be our unshakeable circle of sufficiency. Our purpose must then be to become one who loves others with Christ’s agape. That purpose, when developed, will transform the social dimension of the human self and all of our relationships to others.”
How would loving as Jesus loved eliminate assault and withdrawal within familiar personal relationships?
EXTRA READING:
“The work of God is the calling of a people, whether in the Old Covenant or the New. The church is then not simply the bearer of the message of reconciliation, in the way a newspaper or a telephone company can bear any message with which it is entrusted. Nor is the church simply the result of a message, as an alumni association is the product of a school or the crowds in a theater are the product of the reputation of the film. That men and women are called together to a new social wholeness is itself the work of God, which gives meaning to history.”
- John Howard Yoder (1927 - 1997)