Balanced Priorities: Warm Fuzzies and Accountability

When our kids are little, we like to help them develop their sense of balance by holding their hands while they walk on curbs, or low block walls or something like that. As they get older, they may take on more daring balancing acts, walking on higher fences or on playground equipment. As we get older, that sense of balance can be the difference between life and death, such as when people are climbing in the mountains. We just heard this week about a football player from USC who fell to his death over a steep cliff in California.

Imbalance in our spiritual lives can also have terrible consequences, so I am preaching three sermons this month on the need for balance in the Three Priorities. The three major relationships God calls us to are a relationship with Christ, relationships with the Body of Christ (other believers), and relationships with the world for which Christ died. We need to be balanced and growing in each of these, such that they are all at about the same level in our lives and in our church. But we also need to be balanced within each of those priorities. In Priority One, we saw last week that God calls us to be both a Martha and a Mary: to work for Him, but also to worship Him; to serve Him, and to pray to Him. This week I want to think with you about the need for balance in the second priority, our relationships with other Christians. The balance here is between warm fuzzies and accountability.

This concept grows out of a very versatile word in Greek: parakaleo. The word literally means to call to one’s side. There are several reasons or purposes for which we might call someone to our side, and two of those express the balance we need. To begin with, we might need someone to comfort, encourage, support us or cheer us up.

Here are just a few of the many verses where the word parakaleo means comfort, encourage, etc.

· 1 Thes. 5:11, “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.” Here the context is building each other up, supporting one another, in order to become more than we are; growing together.

· 1 Thes. 5:14, “And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone.” What kind of encouragement would we give someone who was timid or fainthearted? We would come alongside them to support, and cheer them on, to give them courage to keep going, or to face their difficulties.

· 2 Cor. 1:4, “[God]… comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” Comfort and encouragement to keep going, to hang in there, to keep trusting God. It means so much to us to have someone come alongside us when we are going through hardships of any kind.

So it seems clear that when we are hurting, when we are afraid, when we are struggling with life, or even when we are just plodding through life, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, we need others to come alongside us to encourage us, to comfort us, to build us up. The picture is of someone who has been injured, or is too tired to go on, and somebody comes alongside, gets under their arm, and helps them go forward. You’ve seen pictures on the news of one soldier doing that for another who has been wounded. That’s one meaning of parakaleo.

The other meaning has to do with when we appeal to someone, we urge them to do something, or we exhort them to get their act together.

Here are some verses that use the very same Greek word, but the context requires that it be translated differently in some cases.

· 1 Thes. 2:12, “encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.” I think that in the most general sense, this is what exhortation is all about: encouraging and urging others to live lives worthy of God.

· 1 Tim. 5:1, “Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father.” Here’s a verse that tells us something about the tone in which this is done, especially if the person is older than you are: not harshly, not with a critical, punitive spirit, but gently, respectfully.

· Philip. 4:2, “I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord.” This kind of exhortation can take the tone of a pleading, begging, humbly entreating others to correct something in their lives. Here were two ladies in the church who couldn’t seem to get along, and their division was hurting the whole body. So Paul pleaded with them to be reconciled.

· 2 Tim. 4:2, “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage--with great patience and careful instruction.” This kind of exhortation needs to be based squarely on the Word of God. It is not trying to shape other people into our own mold, or to fit our opinion of what they should be doing. It has to be based on God’s standards in the Bible.

As I look at our church, I think we are pretty good at the encouraging side of this balance. I have been so pleased to see the way you leap into action when any member of our body is wounded—physically laid up, or emotionally or spiritually struggling, or dealing with tough relational issues. I know some of you who have invested hours and hours in comforting, consoling, counseling, supporting your friends who are going through tough times. Let me give you just one easy example from recent times. Nikki Zimmerman had surgery a few weeks ago, so when she came home from the hospital, Dean had to carry a large part of the family household load. But then a week or two after that, Dean broke his collarbone “extreme sledding.” Now the chief household support was also laid up. What to do? I spoke with Dean about that, and when I asked if we as a church could bring in some meals, he said, “No, I think we’ve got it covered. When she heard about it, Sgt. Brooke Erickson sprang into action, and in almost no time she had lined up people to bring in meals, as well as car pool transportation for the kids to get to all their activities.” I have seen people in our church spend hours with someone whose marriage was in trouble, trying to help them salvage it. I have seen very practical encouragements like gifts of money, or the gift of a car. I know of some who are very good at “weeping with those who weep”, as they come alongside and feel the pain of another. I think we are pretty good at this.

Well, actually, we are better at giving encouragement than we are at receiving it. Many of us are so strongly independent that our pride rankles at the thought of having to receive help and encouragement from others. We love to do whatever we can to encourage others, but we don’t like to feel like we are indebted to them, we don’t like the feeling of being needy, or weak, so we sometimes resist the loving encouragement and help from our friends. That really is just a symptom of our pride, and we need to let God humble us to the place where we can receive just as readily as give.

But then there is the other side of the word parakaleo, the exhortation side, and that’s where most of us need a lot of help. We don’t like to give it, and we don’t like to receive it, either. I think this is largely because of our culture which is all about private individualism – we like to tell ourselves we are not responsible to anyone else. We keep the walls up, and we want others to keep their nose out of our business. Especially when we know deep down that what we are doing in “our business” is contrary to God’s will. As a result of this cultural attitude, we have the painful example of Ted Haggard, and the pastor at Grace Chapel in Denver, and how many others who have fallen into sin. They had no one to hold them accountable; no one whom they trusted with the inner workings of their souls. And we all need people like that in our lives, because we are all subject to temptation. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” I would never assume that I am immune to temptation, that I could not fall like these men have. The Scripture says, 1 Cor. 10:12, “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” And the God-ordained means of “taking heed” in these matters is to call someone or ones alongside us to hold us accountable and exhort us when needed.

Ultimately, of course, we are accountable to God, not to men. We need to recognize that, as Heb 4:13 says, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” God sees. God knows. Your secrets are not hidden from Him. And ultimately, He is going to hold us accountable for our actions, our words, our thoughts and attitudes, our motives—everything. Every one of us is going to stand before the judgment seat of God, and He is going to examine our lives, and reward us according to how we have lived.

You know that I love God’s grace. I preached a series of 28 sermons on that theme once. It is the life-blood of our relationship with Christ. At the heart of grace is the truth that God loves us no matter what we do or don’t do. There is nothing we can do that will make Him love us less, and there is nothing we can do that will make Him love us more than He does right now.

But grace is a dangerous doctrine in the hands of sinful people like us, and that’s why many churches would rather gravitate to the other end, and focus more on the rules than on God’s grace. Because sinners like us are always tempted to use grace as an excuse for license. In other words, we may reason that if God loves me and forgives me no matter what, then it really doesn’t matter how I live. I can sin all I want, and He’ll still love me and accept me. So I get the best of both worlds—all the pleasures of sin, and all the blessings of God.

This is a serious distortion of the truth. The Scripture is filled with warnings and exhortations to us to live lives worthy of God, pleasing to God, because always in the background is the awe-full reality of God’s judgment. Do not play games with God, friends. Do not presume on His grace. We will have to give account of our lives, to explain our actions, before One who already knows the deepest truth about us.

In order to do well in that final final examination, we need others to hold us to the standards we have set for ourselves, the standards of God that we accept and adopt as our own. We need an accountability partner.

B. Accountability partners Jam 5:16; Rom 15:14; Gal 6:1,2; Col 3:16; 1 Samuel 18:1-4; 20:1

Chuck Swindoll has defined accountability as "a willingness to explain my actions, to answer for my life, to supply the reason why." Here are a few other verses that encourage us to be accountable and to hold others accountable.

· JAM 5:16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. Boy, how about that? When was the last time you confessed your sins to someone else?

· ROM 15:14 I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another. If we are walking in the Spirit, if we are saturating our minds with the Word of God, then we are competent to instruct, to counsel, to exhort one another.

· GAL 6:1 Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. 2 Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. Here’s that attitude of love and gentleness again. It’s not harsh and punitive; we’re trying to help. If you have a burden of sin in your life, I want to help you carry that by getting past it.

This kind of accountability works best when we are in a relationship with a close Christian friend, someone we trust. We trust them with our deepest secrets, knowing that they will not blab it all around town. It also means we trust them to tell us when we are out of line. Again, the root word of encourage/exhort, parakaleo, means to call alongside. We need to take the initiative to call one or more people alongside us and say, Look: I need help here. I need you friends to hold me accountable. I want to do everything I can to please and honor God, and I need you to tell me when I’m not doing that.

This is not the heavy hand of the church authority coming down on us; this is not the distortion that we see in cults where the cult leader has absolute authority over the minute details of the people’s lives. This is one person sharpening another in the context of friendship.

We have a good example of this in the friendship of David and Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of King Saul; David was this young upstart who had defeated Goliath, and was now included in the royal court. These two young men, about the same age, became close friends. Their hearts were knit together, and Jonathan even went so far as to make a sort of formal covenant with David by giving him his royal robe, his tunic, his sword, his bow and his belt.

But Saul became jealous of David and his military successes, and pretty soon, David realized Saul was trying to kill him. So he fled from Saul and went to Jonathan and asked, 1 Sam 20:1, “What have I done? What is my crime? How have I wronged your father, that he is trying to take my life?” Now you could take that as just a whining complaint, but I think, because of the nature of the friendship between these two young men, and because of David’s spiritual condition at the time, it was a serious question. David can’t understand why Saul hates him; all he has tried to do was to serve the king. So he goes to his most trusted friend and asks one of the most vulnerable questions anyone can ask: Tell me where I am wrong. He is willing to hear the truth about himself. He recognizes that he may have done something wrong that he doesn’t see, so he asks his friend to show it to him.

Holding someone accountable and being held accountable is a mutual thing. We enter into a relationship like this because we both recognize that we need help, and we love each other enough to help them. There are three verses in Proverbs 27 that all speak to this mutuality and equality

· Pr 27:6, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted…” (The implication is that wounds from an enemy aren’t necessarily for our good.)

· Pr 27:9, “Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of one's friend springs from his earnest counsel.”

One of the main reasons why church discipline does not work very well in our society is because of the attitude I mentioned before that we simply do not think our business is anyone else’s business. We are so private and prideful that we overreact when the church authorities tell us to shape up, and we just leave to go find another church that doesn’t know about our sin. Frankly, I don’t know how to counteract that cultural value that is so deeply ingrained in most of us, except through the voluntary, mutual accountability that we can have with close friends. It is up to you, friends: will you continue to hide behind your privacy fence, or will you invite someone in to your life as an accountability partner?

One big reason why we need this sort of accountability is because we all have blind spots. Here’s a grid that shows what is known and not known about us:

In the top left quadrant, some things are just common knowledge: for example, I know that I’m somewhat of an introvert, and many of you recognize that about me too.

There are other things about me that I know, but you do not, because I have managed to keep them private. Some of those things are trivial, like the fact that I once wanted to be a research chemist, and grew copper sulfate crystals in a science fair experiment. Other things in this quadrant are more personal, and I only reveal them to very trusted friends, or not at all.

The bottom left quadrant is the one we are talking about here: things that you can observe about me, but I don’t see them until you tell me. I remember one night when Barbie told me something that she knew but I didn’t. We were leaving a dinner party at some friends’ home, and when we got in the car, she asked, “Why do you always have to be right?” Naturally, I insisted, “I don’t always have to be right! And I’m right about that!” But that was a revelation to me. No doubt others had seen it too, but it was a blind spot for me. Her loving comment helped me see myself more realistically, and enabled me to begin to work on that negative trait.

The point here is that there are many things about us that we can’t see. Just like you have never seen the small of your back without a mirror, we need someone to hold the mirror up to us to help us see some parts of our character or personality or behavior that are not honoring to God.

(I should also say that this is a valuable service we can perform for our friends on the positive side, too. Most of us do not see our positive traits very clearly, either, and it is a tremendous blessing to have someone whom we know will not flatter us tell us what good things they see in us. We can’t hear that sort of thing too often!)

Eccl 4:9-12 is a great passage on the value of uniting with others to help us live lives that are worthy of our calling. “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: 10 If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! 11 Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? 12 Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken”. Note that this passage speaks both of picking us up when we have fallen, say, into sin, and also the preventative strength that comes from this kind of accountability relationship. Even though I may be overpowered by temptation if I try to face it alone, if I have someone else I can call on in the hour of need, I can withstand it.

One way that friends can help us be strong so as not to fall is to enter into an agreement in which we will ask each other some probing questions. If I know that you are going to ask me these questions when we meet, I am going to do everything I possibly can not to be embarrassed. Just knowing that the questions are coming helps me resist temptation in all these areas. This is sort of a miniature, earthly version of the penetrating examination God is going to conduct at the judgment seat, and it works the same way. I don’t want to be embarrassed by God, so I try to live a live honoring to Him at all times. But that final judgment can seem a really long way off, and it doesn’t always have the motivational power I wish it did. But if I’m being tempted on Saturday, and I know that I’m going to meet with my accountability partners on Tuesday, that helps me be strong.

Here are the questions that I have my Elder Accountability Team ask me each time we meet. These are on your outline, and I recommend them to you.

1. Have you been a testimony this period to the greatness of Jesus Christ with both your words and actions?

2. Have you lingered over sexually alluring material, or allowed your mind to entertain inappropriate sexual thoughts about another person this period?

3. Have you lacked integrity in your financial dealings, or coveted something that does not belong to you?

4. Have you been honoring, understanding, and generous in your important relationships this period? How would your wife/husband say your marriage is doing? May we ask her/him?

5. Have you damaged another person by your words, either behind their back or face-to-face?

8. Have you secretly wished for another’s misfortune, so that you might excel?

Now we all know that you can lie when answering these questions. You can continue to keep the privacy fence up around your sin so that these trusted friends can’t see it. But then you miss out on the blessings and benefits that come with a life that is pure before God. And you might find yourself in Ted Haggard’s position: rather than admit to a few who he was, he was embarrassed before the whole nation, and lost everything. If there is cancer in your body, it never helps to deny or ignore it. It needs to be cut out as soon as possible if there is to be any chance of recovery.

There are lots of benefits to living a life that is pleasing to God, a life of holiness, and I want those for you. But I am equally concerned about the glory of God. The name of Jesus Christ is regularly dragged through the mud in our country because of the actions of so-called Christians. We need to do everything we can to bring Him honor and glory, rather than embarrassment. Let’s take this business of edifying and building up the Body of Christ seriously. Look for ways to encourage, to help, to support, to cheer up those who are hurting. But also, I urge you to go to a friend, ask them to be your mutual accountability partner, so that together you can be the people God wants you to be, and honor the Lord in every way.

I’m pretty sure that some of you are thinking, “That’s nice Jim. Good thoughts. I’m really glad that you, as our pastor, are in an accountability relationship. But there is no way in the world I’m going to do that!” How I pray that you will not go away this morning with that attitude. Most of you have cleaned up the outside of your lives pretty nicely, but what’s on the inside? I know what’s in my heart, and it isn’t pretty. The Pharisees looked good on the outside, but inside, they were full of dead men’s bones. Folks, we cannot do this on our own. We need help. Ask someone to help you, to hold you accountable for becoming the person you really want to be.

[1] See also Acts 16:40; 20:1-3; 2 Cor 2:7; 2 Cor 7:6,7; Eph 6:22; 1 Th 3:2; 2 Th 2:16-17

[2] See also Acts 2:40; 11:23; 27:33-35; 1 Cor. 4:16; 2 Cor. 5:20; 1 Tim. 2:1; Titus 1:9; 2:6; Hebrews 3:13; 13:22