Gather Experience

What is community living? Let’s define it, It’s people, situations, meekness, listening, discipleship & radical serving/love. It’s the opportunity to gather experience, the beautiful love dance between people and God. To learn to love complete strangers by living with them is an art. An art that takes time to cultivate & find the groove to doing life together under the word. It should not be taken lightly that the Christian has the privilege to live among other Christians. Even Jesus lived in the midst of his enemies.

“You have to go wholeheartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

Learning to bear one another, as Christ bore us. Enduring the brethren, enduring hardship well. Just as Christ bore our sin, He stood in the gap and makes intercession for us to the father so that we may be forgiven. We need to stand in the gap for our brothers and sisters and make intercession for them, in that case we are enduring them by enduring the cross.

To obtain eternal life we must learn to endure persecution, suffer well! It takes a violent faith, violent love, to be able to grasp the knowledge that is to lofty to obtain. We must fight for the ones we love, especially Jesus. He loves us enough to stand in the gap himself and pray to the father on our lowly behalves. it’s not an easy thing if it was then we would not want it. It is something dear to the father’s heart - How good and pleasant is it when brothers live together in unity. Bearing one another by living together. Through going low in humility and serving one another. To call yourself the greatest is actually to call yourself the lowliest of all! To be familiar with sufferings, to endure persecution without resentment is when you are truly displaying meekness and holiness unto the Lord. Jesus endured the harshest persecution, he had done no violence, spoke nothing bad, but yet he was persecuted for it. After suffering, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. If you want to live a Godly life, you will be persecuted for many things in your life.

Ruined for the ordinary; Called to the extraordinary. We are ruined for what is normal, we will lead a nomadic lifestyle, we will endure persecution and we will need to be silent and endure it without resentment. Intercede for those that persecute us. As in community living, we are to bear the burdens, as Christ bore us. We are to love one another through many things. Life together brings out the real rawness in people. We are all searching for authenticity in one another but we truly find it in the Lord, only he can show us what it is.

The kindness he had to not wipe us off like little scum, amazes me. The Lords kindness and mercy to intercede on our behalf is glorious and painful all at once. It shows me he is willing - an innocent man took my burdens and sins, yet he still prays for me to the father, to be with him in heaven. The glory of the servant is his mercy and kindness he has upon us. He is glorified by being brought low. He went through the lowliest of all things and He is glorified! We praise this man who was marred beyond human likeness. We indeed suffer these days for the gospel - we are/will be persecuted for what we believe/who we believe. We are striving for eternal life with the one that has called us from the time of our confession. Contending for the eternal life on this earth now, we will endure persecution, but when we have our mind/thoughts on the things above with the end goal in mind, it makes it a bit more bearable. The posture of our heart and the focus/ intention we have in our lives determines how/what we will go through to obtain just a glimpse of the glory of the Lord. We are to be a dwelling place for the Lord, to cultivate our deep well, for the Lord to bestow his glory, the deep things he only has for the ones he loves.

To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son - it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. - CS Lewis

He delights in us as an artist in his work. He has made us a real ingredient, there is an authenticity in all of us. When you add things to a pot, they have a different role. As the body, we all have a different purpose. A house as the pot and all living in community, we are the ingredients for something so divine or something disastrous. We are called to something higher up the mountain, the perseverance we must have, the patience we must have sometime feels impossible to obtain. This is where grace comes into play. The grace to see freedom in a brother by bearing a brother and enduring persecution with him. To see our brother free is something we should want more than our own freedom. To lay down our lives for our brother to be free by walking out the example of freedom yourself.