Grace Connecting: Exposure without Rejection

The Big Idea: You’re reading Part Two of a series designed to equip you with five biblical counseling skills using the acrostic GRACE. Read Part One: How to Care Like Christ. Excerpted from Spiritual Friends.

What Grace Connecting Requires: Romans 5:6-8

Grace connection requires exposure without rejection, truth with relationship, curiosity rather than analysis, and face-to-face relating instead of back-to-back professionalism. Christ models exposure without rejection in Romans 5:6-8. “While we were yet sinners” (exposure). “Christ died for us” (acceptance). Grace connection communicates, “I see you warts and all, and I still love you, accept you, like you, and move toward you.”

Paul models truth with relationship in Ephesians 4:15. He tells us that the essence of pastoral care involves speaking and living out the truth in love. Consider possible ways to do ministry:

• Truth Minus Relationship: Intimidation/Compliance

• Relationship Minus Truth: Indecision/Confusion

• Truth Plus Relationship: Internalization/Conformity to Christ

Jesus models curiosity versus analysis. At the end of John 2, John notes that Jesus knew all people universally and deeply. Yet, he did not allow his full knowledge to blind him to the uniqueness of individuals. Following John 2, Jesus engages two of the most diverse individuals imaginable: the Jewish male moral religious leader and the Samaritan female immoral irreligious follower. Reread both accounts and you’ll see his respect for each. His probing curiosity. His unique interactions and involvement.

Analysis views your spiritual friend as “a specimen” to be dissected, analyzed, and studied. Curiosity sees your spiritual friend as an image bearer to be experienced, a mystery to enter, and a soul to know.

We would all do well to tape the following prayer somewhere in our “counseling” office. Or better, somewhere in our soul.

The Spiritual Friend’s Prayer: “Dear Lord, Help me to approach every relationship as an audience with an eternally valuable human being.”

In John 3-4, Jesus models face-to-face relating instead of back-to-back professionalism. He enters their individual worlds. He goes where they are, both geographically and soulfully. He becomes a cartographer of their soul, exploring their personal terrain.

With the woman at the well, in particular, he exposes his humanness. He’s authentic, open, vulnerable, and honest. He connects, touches, and moves toward. He’s anything but surface, fake, phony, uncaring, and distancing.

Building a Connected Spiritual Friendship: Galatians 6:1

How do you develop connected relationships? Exploring how not to develop grace relationships begins to answer that question.

How Not to Build Grace Connections: Job 16:2

Job accused his “friends” of being “miserable comforters.” The word “miserable” means troublesome, vexing, and sorrow-causing. They were the opposite of “comforters”—they were not consoling, sympathetic; they did not feel deeply Job’s hurt. They never said or conveyed in any way, “It’s normal to hurt.”

Instead of grace connecting, they practiced condemning distancing. Read the verses below and notice examples of their poor relational abilities flowing out of their poor theology (Job 42:7) and their cold hearts:

1. Superiority: Job 5:8; 8:2; 11:2-12; 12:1-3; 15:7-17

“We’re better than you. You’re inferior to us.”

2. Judgmentalism: Job 4:4-9; 15:2-6

“It’s not normal to hurt! Your suffering is due to your sinning!”

3. Advice without Insight/Discernment: Job 5:8; 8:5-6; 11:13-20; 42:7

“Here’s what I would do if I were you.” “Do this and life’s complexities will melt away.” “I have the secret that will fix your situation.” They offered quick, trite advice. They were rescuers, answer men, and cliché makers. 

The Rest of the Story

I know, you want to scream, “Don’t stop now! Not with what not to do!” Sorry. But come on back for Part Three: How to Build Grace Connections.

Join the Conversation

How would your relationships change if you prayed The Spiritual Friend’s Prayer? “Dear Lord, Help me to approach every relationship as an audience with an eternally valuable human being.”

How to Care Like Christ: Offer GRACE

The Big Idea: You’re reading Part One of a new blog mini-series designed to equip you with five biblical counseling skills using the acrostic GRACE. Excerpted from Spiritual Friends.

What to Do After the Hug

When your friend comes to you in the throes of suffering, how can you help? What do you do after the hug? Or, put another way, “How can my spiritual friends and I engage in grace relationships that sustain their faith?”

This question begs another. “What is a grace relationship?” Grace relationships involve five one another relational competencies that I summarize using the acrostic GRACE:

• G Grace Connecting: Proverbs 27:6

• R Rich Soul Empathizing: Romans 12:15

• A Accurate/Active Spiritual Listening: John 2:23-4:43

• C Caring Spiritual Conversations: Ephesians 4:29

• E Empathetic Scriptural Explorations: Isaiah 61:1-3

Picture grace that helps others in their time of need. Picture Jesus. Picture caring like Christ.

“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16).

What a perfect picture of grace relating. Jesus is not aloof, distant, or removed. In His incarnation, He went through the heavens to earth sharing in our humanity, becoming like us, so that He might help us (Hebrews 2:14-18). Jesus is not unsympathetic. He is touched with the feelings of our infirmities. He’s able to suffer with and be affected similarly to us. He has the same pathos, shares the same experience, has fellow feelings, endures a mutual participation, and partakes of a full acquaintance with us. He offers grace to help in our time of need—well-timed help, help in the nick of time, words aptly spoken in season and actions seasoned with grace.

We can become Jesus with skin on by expressing GRACE relational competencies. The first of which we aptly call “Grace Connecting”: personal involvement with a deep commitment to the maturity of another person.

Grace Connecting: Committed Involvement—Proverbs 27:6

Grace connecting involves communion through communication. You have love in your heart for your spiritual friends. Do they know that? Can they feel it? Do they experience you? Grace connecting allows your passionate love to powerfully touch your spiritual friend.

Connecting is the foundational competency in the art of relationships. Spouses need it. So do parents, co-workers, teammates, friends, church members, and neighbors. We all need to become competent connectors. If we were, all professional helpers (social workers, counselors, and psychologists) would be superfluous, extra, excess, fluff.

The Need for Grace Connecting

There’s plenty of potential pain in spiritual friendship. Ponder what it’s like for you when another person becomes aware of the grief in your soul or the sin in your heart. Risk. Vulnerability. Exposure. Consider:

• How unpleasant it is when you experience and acknowledge devastating emotions (Psalm 42, Psalm 88) (emotional).

• How shameful it feels to admit your sinful motivations and actions, and to feel too weak to do anything about them (Romans 7, James 4-5, Hebrews 3) (volitional).

• How embarrassing it is to confess your mental confusion and sub-biblical images and beliefs about God, others, yourself, and life (Romans 8, 12, Ephesians 4) (rational).

• How vulnerable you feel when you open up about emptiness and thirsts in your soul (Romans 8:18-27) (relational).

• What it’s like to feel like your hurt is abnormal (sustaining).

• What it’s like to believe that it’s impossible to hope (healing).

• What it’s like to experience the horrors of your sin without understanding the wonders of God’s grace (reconciling).

• What it’s like to sense that you’ll never mature (guiding).

When people share about these issues, they need a trustworthy friend. They need grace relationships offered through grace connecting.

Defining Grace Connecting: Proverbs 27:6; 20:30

What is grace connecting? I often learn best by opposites, by poor examples. Let’s start with what grace connecting is not.

Grace Connecting Is Not

The following would not make the pain, risk, and vulnerability of spiritual friendship bearable.

• A Warm Feeling: “Boy, I feel neat when I’m with you.” Spiritual friendship is not always a pleasant experience.

• Sweetness: Merely reflecting and mirroring whatever your spiritual friend says. Non-directive acceptance of everything, including sin.

• A Stage in Counseling: “We’ll do connecting today and then drop it.”

• A Technique in Counseling: “Crying 101.” “Three steps to really caring.”

What Grace Connecting Is: Incarnation

Let’s develop from Scripture our definition of grace connecting: personal involvement with a deep commitment to the maturity of another person. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” Solomon teaches in Proverbs 27:6 (KJV).

“Wounds” are a splitting apart as a doctor does for surgery, an exposure. You enter the ER and say, “Doctor, my chest and the right side of my body are killing me!” You don’t want him to simply be sweet. “That must be really hard for you.” You want him to be skillful, competent—able to diagnose and treat your ailment. So, too, with spiritual friendship. You want to be able to compassionately diagnose heart issues, pulling open the soul and peering deeply inside.

“Faithful” means to support, to bear, to be trustworthy. Alonzo, facing the diagnosis of inoperable cancer, wants to be able to say about you, “I trust you with my soul.” “Faithful” also means to be strong, stable. Alonzo wants to know that his words will not overwhelm you. Touch you deeply, yes. Overwhelm you, no. As his wounds are opened, he wants to know that they will not make you faint, that you will not think less of him.

“Friend” literally means “one who loves you, lover.” The Scriptures use the same word in 2 Chronicles 20:7, calling Abraham God’s “forever friend.” Think of God’s grace relationship with Abraham—encounter, intimacy, fellowship, accountability, fidelity, stability—and you will picture grace connecting.

Proverbs 20:30 speaks of deep commitment to maturity. “Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being.” “Cleanse” means to rub, to polish, to grind and buff repeatedly. Picture waxing your car, cleaning your silver. That’s hard work requiring time, effort, and commitment. Alonzo wants to know that you will use all your resources to help him in his time of need. Connection means that you are committed to Alonzo’s growth even when it hurts him and you.

The Rest of the Story

Join us next time as we learn how to practice the art of grace connecting.

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Who ministers to you through grace connecting?

To Glorify God and to Comfort the Saints

*A review of Anthony J. Carter, “On Being Black and Reformed: A New Perspective on the African American Christian Experience”

With one succinct sentence, Anthony Carter integrates historical Reformation theology and historical African American experience. “Our primary goal as theologians is to glorify God and to comfort the saints.”

Some may wonder what’s so novel about that declaration. A careful reading of most modern presentations of Reformed theology exposes the truth that God’s glory is always emphasized (rightly so), while the saints’ comfort is often minimized (sadly so).

Reformation theology has historically offered great treatises on anthropology (human creation and God’s design), hamartiology (human sin and depravity), and on soteriology (Christ’s salvation and human deliverance). Historically, what has been lacking is a biblical sufferology—a theology of suffering that brings comfort to human misery, that brings hope to the hurting.

Throughout “On Being Black and Reformed” Carter’s subtext reverberates. Reformed theology has much to offer African American Christians. And, African American Christians have much to offer Reformed theology. When separated from Reformed theology, African American Christians, according to Carter, are tempted toward a lower view of God, truth, and theology. When separated from African American Christianity, Reformed theology, according to Carter, is tempted toward a lower view of comfort, love, and contextual experience. Reformed theology and African American Christianity need each other equally.

Nowhere is this juxtaposition more clearly revealed than in the Reformed African American theological interpretation of American enslavement. How could a good and sovereign God allow an entire people group to be enslaved for centuries? African American pastors like Lemuel Haynes, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones, and writers like Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Quobna Cugoano all offer the “Joseph Answer.” “You meant evil against me, but God intended it for good.” In God’s affectionate sovereignty, He shepherds good from evil, He creates beauty from ashes.

Anthony Carter’s retelling of this historical merging of African American Christian experience and Reformed theology is a gift to all people of all races.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of “Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction,” “Soul Physicians,” and “Spiritual Friends.”

Nominated for eight academy awards, “There Will Be Blood” plays like a modern-day version of Genesis 4. Though many Christians may resist seeing it, and many who do may wish they hadn’t, “Blood” is replete with themes of biblical proportions. It is certainly not a “Christian movie,” but Christianity thoroughly addresses the issues it raises: greed, envy, hypocrisy, rage, lying, manipulation, selfishness, self-sufficiency, and a plethora of other sins of the flesh and idols of the heart.

The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview whose sin is in plain view for all to see, despise, and be haunted by. Not a single word is spoken in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. Yet the scene speaks volumes. Daniel falls down a mind shaft severely hurting his leg. Rather than crying out to God or to anyone else for help, Daniel wordlessly and arrogantly works his way out of the pit rug by rug, dragging his lifeless limb behind him. The metaphor has been written: “I am my own Savior.” Daniel in the lion’s den refuses to pray to the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

In the next scene, this sinner who thinks he can save himself learns from a mysterious stranger that there’s oil in those hills of New Boston. Traveling to the California oil fields at the turn of the 20th Century, Plainview brings his young son, H. W. (played by Dillon Freasier), who serves as a prop to provide the image of a congenial family man. Upon arrival in New Boston, CA, Daniel meets the Sunday family, headed by patriarch Abel (remember Genesis 4). Abel’s son Eli (played by Paul Dano) is a young faith-healing evangelist-pastor who turns out to be as consummately evil as Plainview, and a tad bit slimier.

Neither man displays a single redeeming quality. Both men play games with the Redeemer. Eli uses God to amass a following. Daniel uses God to manipulate God’s followers into signing land over to him, even to the point of feigning acceptance of Christ. In “There Will Be Blood,” blood is shed, but the shed blood of Christ is never received with a sincere heart.

The darkness of Daniel’s life is suffocating. As he ages (the movie spans nearly forty years in its nearly three-hour run), Daniel’s evil ripens. Where he once at least feigned love for H. W., by the end of the movie Daniel disowns him. In perhaps the only sign of grace in the entire movie, H. W., mute due to an earlier drilling accident, signs to his father “I love you” right after his prodigal father disowns him. Off H. W. goes with his wife Mary (yet another biblical allusion) to make a different life for himself in Mexico.

Christian theology sees life as a three-act play of creation, fall, and redemption. God designs humanity with dignity (creation), sin mars humanity with depravity (fall), and Christ restores and rescues humanity with salvation (redemption). There will be blood is an accurate portrayal of what our world would be like if there were no creation and no redemption–only fall. There is nothing redeemable in humanity because there is nothing human to redeem. We are, in the eyes of “Blood,” devolved animals seeking to devour one another.

You leave “Blood” feeling bloody, dirty, filthy. But “Blood” doesn’t leave you. It preoccupies your mind, disturbs your soul, and troubles your spirit. You ask yourself, “Is that all there is?”

And the answer is, “Without Christ, that is indeed all that there is.” Self. Self-sufficiency. Evil. Hatred. Rage. Hopelessness. Helplessness.

This decidedly un-Christian movie about the first decades of the 20th century has perhaps the strongest evangelistic message of any film of the first decade of the 21st century. Certainly unintended, “Blood” depicts exactly why every human being needs the blood of Christ. It is an amazing picture of the amazing sin that requires amazing grace.

Our worst sin is not our greed, evil, rage, hatred, drinking, womanizing, etc. Our worst sin, and the only unforgivable sin, is our refusal to acknowledge our sinfulness, the refusal to ask for forgiveness. We are sick undo death and in denial about our deadness, thinking that we can raise ourselves.

What can wash away our sin of self-sufficiency? Nothing but the blood.

“I . . . acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life.”[i] These words from the pen of the Christian Olaudah Equiano might seem trite until we realize that they introduce the narrative of his harrowing kidnapping and enslavement.

Equiano was born free in 1745 in the kingdom of Benin on the coast of Africa, then known as Guinea. The youngest of seven children, his loving parents gave him the name Olaudah, signifying favored one. Indeed, he lived a favored life in his idyllic upbringing in a simple and quiet village where his father served as the “chief man” who decided disputes and punished crimes, and where his mother adored him dearly.

Bathed in Tears: Weeping with Those Who Weep

At age ten, it all came crashing down. “One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, tied our hands, and ran off with us into the nearest wood: and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment, and spent the night.”[ii]

His kidnappers then unbound Equiano and his sister. Overpowered by fatigue and grief, they had just one source of relief. “The only comfort we had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears.”[iii]

Equiano and his sister model a foundational principle of sustaining empathy: weeping with those who weep. Far too often we rush in with words, and far too often those words are words of rescue. Our hurting friends need our silence, not our speeches. The shed tear and the silent voice provide great enrichment for our spiritual friends.

[i] Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, p. 4.
[ii] Ibid., p. 24.
[iii] Ibid., p. 25.

Tom Brady.

If you know anything about sports, then the name Tom Brady jumps out at you.

NFL MVP.

Starting quarterback for New England Patriots.

A 60 million dollar contract.

Dating whatever super model he wants to date.

Well, watch this interview and seem Tom Brady struggle with life’s core question: “Is this all there is?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHSfiKAtPzk&NR=1

Use the video to reach others who long to know if there’s more than fame and fortune.