There Will Be Divisions.

The church in Corinth was so divided that you might say it was diced. There were divisions over which apostle was superior, sexual morality, lawsuits, marriage, eating meat, head-coverings for women, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of believers, and I’m probably missing some.

Paul, who really wanted these saints to “be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10), said something in chapter 11, verse 19 that is important for us to remember:

There must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.

Factions though painful serve the church. They provide opportunity to show up the hearts of people. How?

Well through 1 Corinthians Paul tells us how. Like, exposing an unwillingness to submit to the apostles’ teaching is certainly one thing (e.g.1 Cor11:16). But a lack of love is the biggie (1 Cor 13). Paul said love is greater than faith (1 Cor 13:13). And if we have truth and not love, we’re nothing (1 Cor 13:2). Nothing.

There are people in churches who are disagreed over issues and that in itself is not altogether wrong. There will be differences. There will be disagreements. But when we disengage just because we disagree, we have violated a higher rule – the law of love. It shows up the heart. There may be truth but there is no love. And where there is no love, we are nothing. It is the bottom-line measure of discipleship.

Paul said there must be factions. Factions reveal hearts. So in our disagreements and divisions, Paul wants us to measure our motives, words, and actions by the gauge of chapter 13. The less

they look or sound like biblically defined love, the more concerned he wants us to be about the genuineness of our discipleship.

Trust

I have been wired to be a very trusting person. I love to believe in people. As a result, anyone who knows me - even a little bit - knows that loyalty and trust are my highest values in relationship.

But as someone very smart once said:
An unguarded strength is a double weakness.

So my intense desire to trust others and be trustworthy has - at times - come back to bite me. And usually, the damage had little to do with the actions of the other person. It had everything to do with my approach.

This past weekend, I was led to look at some of my failed relationships in the past where I had so trusted someone only to discover that they had betrayed me. I am not bitter about those relationships. Every failed relationship blessed me with some level of growth (through pain, of course).

And this is what I discovered: I’m learning that it’s as important to define what trust is not as to define what it is. Here are my current thoughts on the subject:

* Trusting someone doesn’t mean they’ll never fail you or hurt you. It just means they wouldn’t intentionally do it, or do it the same way over and over again.

* Trusting someone doesn’t demand that they’re a part of your life forever.

* It’s okay to trust someone in one area of your life, but not in another. Just be clear - with them, and yourself.

* Trust is not a pass/fail class. There are degrees and shades of trust. Discerning the different dimensions is the first step toward developing more trust.

* My level of trust in someone is often about my own moods, experiences, and perceptions. I must monitor these conditions and factor them in.

* People can’t earn your trust where expectations aren’t defined. Everyone you truly care about deserves to understand your standards.

The only one who is completely and eternally trustworthy is Jesus – The man who trusts in Him will never be put to shame.

The Humiliation of Crucifixion

When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn't, for the most part, cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that is generally more feared than physical pain. When he asked God if it was really necessary to die in this way he was referring to more than death through capital punishment.

Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind. It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well.

It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.

But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.

In the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn't connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.

Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS, and diseases such as Parkinson's, and other such sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.

Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the gospels say, "necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory?"

Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn't easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience:

Ask yourself this question with courage and honesty: What experiences in my life have made me deep? In virtually every case, I will venture to say, experiences that have deepened you will be incidences that you feel some shame in acknowledging, a powerlessness from which you were unable to protect yourself, an abuse from which you could not defend yourself, an inadequacy of body or mind that has left you vulnerable, an humiliating incident that once happened to you, or some mistake you made which publicly exposed your lack of strength in some area. All of us, like Jesus, have also been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And we have depth of soul to just that extent.

But depth of soul comes in very different modes. Humiliation makes us deep, but we can be deep in character, understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness or we can be deep in anger, bitterness, and revenge-seeking. Jesus' crucifixion stretched his heart and made it huge in empathy, graciousness, and forgiveness.

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. That pain stretched his heart to a great depth. But that new space did not fill in with bitterness and anger. It filled in instead with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we have yet to fully understand.

Behold Jesus, our Lord! There is no one like Him.