Learning to Love One Another

Christian Personal Relationship Talk 1

Missionary Families of Christ

The World Situation today

Society is changing rapidly.

• From a slowly-changing, tradition-conscious, rural world into a high-speed, computer-equipped future.
• Characterized by technological change, mobility and the individualistic ethos.
• The moral consensus of the past on how people are to related is disintegrating.

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Values and relationships are affected

The result is a society without common values and without stable patterns of relationships

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Five aspects

Personal life and relationships that have been affected

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Emphasis on Feelings

Feelings are too often allowed to determine how people relate to one another.

• Traditional Christian morality is rejected as arbitrary and impersonal.

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• Modern society tends to admire the expression of feelings. While people in the past were largely concerned with whether behavior was right or wrong, many people today are concerned with whether their behavior is “real.”

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• Guided by uncontrolled emotions and without confidence that they can handle their feelings, people drift passively in and out of depression, anger, moodiness.

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Fear of Commitment

In an age of uncertainty, people fear commitment in personal life. People like to keep their options open, and this attitude has carried over into personal relationships.

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Poverty in relationships

Many people are lonely.

• People have been moving away from living in relatively small, close-knit groups where relationships were strong.

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• There is a great deal of superficial activity and sociability, but people still struggle with feelings of insecurity and find themselves unneeded and alone.

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• Social media, especially cell phones have kept people from personal conversation and deepening of relationships.

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Lack expressions of affection and personal support

Aside from erotic relationships or physical affection to small children, expressions of affection between adults are rare

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Low self-esteem

People have a poor sense of self-worth.

• Society values people according to standards of physical beauty, intelligence, productivity, material success, or youthfulness.

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• People who don’t “measure up” end up troubled with a sense of failure and worthlessness.

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Relationships Today

As relationships among relative, in neighborhoods and within the local church have weakened, a new ideal of personal relationships has come into focus.

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Relationship Today

Two-fold: a sexual relationship and a circle of close friends. Such relationships are often not successful.

This types of relationships tend to be:

• Exclusive. Within these relationships people may relate in an intimate, honest way, but with outsiders they tend to be cautious or indifferent
• Not bound by cleat commitments. When feelings conflict or fade, relationships often give way.

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The Christian Alternative

Jesus taught his disciples new ways to relate with one another.

• Jn 15:12-13; Phil 2:1-8; Acts 4:32-35
• A recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ.
• The ways Christians relate to one another reveal something of the very nature of God.
• Mercy, forgiveness, faithfulness, service love, compassionate authority, loyal obedience.

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Characteristics of Christian Personal Relationships

We should learn to make commitments to one another as Christians.

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Characteristics of Christian Personal Relationships

We should learn to make commitments to one another as Christians.

• Need to join our lives together. Need to give our relationships some stability. MFC is our family.
• Need to outgrow our fear of deeper commitments. Need to personally commit ourselves to love and serve one another as brethren.
• Live out our covenant in MFC.

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Recognize a new basis for personal relationships

We are brothers and sisters in the Lord, and we are to serve one another.

• Not founded on attraction to one another, but rather our common desire to become what God wants us to be and our common commitment to serve Him.
• Our relationship should be primary relationship in our lives.
• Our relationships will then cease to be exclusive.

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Learn to handle our feelings in the right way

• When our feelings do not impel us to act lovingly, we must learn to subordinate them to the kind of behavior that God calls us to.

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• Difference between reaction and response

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Express affection in our relationships

Both verbally and physcially

• Personal greetings, warm smiles, edifying words, handshakes, brotherly hugs, sisterly kisses.
• Especially to those closest to us (spouse, children, household members)
• Not based on our feelings, but on the other person’s need to experience God’s love through us.

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The kingdom of God is not just a system of beliefs, but a new social order.

We in MFC are to be a family conformed to God’s ways and transformed by His love.

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We need to rely on the power of God so we can change.

God wants to place His love within us.

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Be faithful to our life together in MFC

• A body of brothers and sisters in the Lord.
• A support environment with resources of teaching, formation and pastoral care. A place where new patters of relationships can develop

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Let us obey Jesus’ command

“Let us love one another, because love is of God.”

– 1 Jn.4:7

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