Last Wednesday evening I attended a meeting of our men’s group at church. We call ourselves Iron Men, not because we are strong or hard, but because Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.” We are a racially and ethnically diverse group but we have each been adopted into God’s family through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ so we are, in a very true sense of the word, brothers.
After sharing a light meal together, we watched a short video on the “rite of passage” from boyhood to manhood and then broke off into groups of five with three questions designed to encourage each of us to share our life experiences with each other in the intimacy of that small group. Differences of age, race, ethnicity and financial or social status all melted away as we shared our lives and our hearts with each other. At the end we formed a small circle, joined hands and prayed together as one.
That experience brought to my mind an image of the earliest churches described in Acts and in Paul’s letters to them. They were also small groups. They met in homes, breaking bread together and then sharing their joys, burdens and testimonies with each other. Jew and Gentile, young and old, slave or free, rich or poor they shared their strong faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ encouraging and sharpening each other as a result. There were people even back then who tried to exploit differences in order to cause friction and division, but those differences quickly melted away in an atmosphere of love, faith and God’s presence with them and in them. Brothers and sisters in Christ joined hands and prayed together and those prayers were answered in miraculous ways.
Our nation and the world is more and more divided into groups that distrust, fear or even hate other groups. Much of this division is fueled by lies and misconceptions. What is the answer? First we must begin or renew our personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Then we need to meet with believers from those other groups to form personal relationships with them through open and honest conversations sharing our thoughts and feelings. God will show us that we have a lot more in common than we can imagine.
As a Christian teenager in 1957, I watched Billy Graham and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stand side by side on the platform in front of a packed Madison Square Garden and proclaim, “There is only one race – the human race and everyone in that race needs Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” That night people with every shade of skin came forward together to receive Christ and become brothers and sisters in God’s family. Jesus bridges the gap between us and God and He will bridge the gaps between us if we let Him.