Individualism and isolation is a one-two punch that is rocking Christendom in America. We desperately need friendships. Scott Roley calls those friends Your Gospel Posse. He spoke about its power last night at the PCA General Assembly. Scott's text was Luke 5:17-26, the passage when Doctor Luke recounts the friends who brought the paralytic to Jesus. Here is part of what Roley said:
"[Gospel friends] believe in, and believe for each other. It's a grace thing when friends are neither offended, undone or disappear in the presence of each other's sin, brokenness and disease. Remember there's more than one kind of paralysis. Who knows your faith struggle? Where are you paralyzed? Do you know your friends and colleagues well enough to see the warning signs?"
Where are you paralyzed?How about one of your friends? Being a part of a Gospel Posse means making a phone call, offering up a prayer, tracking down a wandering soul, or lifting up a discouraged brother or sister in the faith. The writer of Hebrews describes the work of gospel friendship:
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. (Hebrews 3:12-14 ESV)
MY PRAYER:Lord, help me do the work of the Gospel Posse. Use me today to keep one of your own from being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Show me the friend I can encourage. Help me to understand what I should do.