Teddy Dickerson on "Relation Holiness" by Oord and Lodahl

I remember when I was a kid sitting in Sunday school listening to my teacher talk about Jesus Christ being my own personal Savior.  As I sat there on a round, not so comfortable, carpet, staring at this flannel graph of Jesus glowing like a light bulb, waiting to sing Father Abraham again; I had this image of what being a Christian looked like.  I saw each and every person that had accepted the love of Christ completely surrounded by a glass tube, like a sound proof booth on a game show.  This tube reached from the person all the way to God, creating a relationship that was independent from all the other people on earth.  I was safe in this tube because others could not affect my relationship with God; I was free and separated to walk my own Christian life.

I am thankful for the enlightenment that I had in my life when I learned that this Christian life is not meant to be lived alone, not to be separated into our own individual journeys but as Oord and Lodahl talk about in the book, as Christians we are the Greek word Paraclete “one called to be alongside.” I was trapped in this world of righteous personal piety, and was failing miserably.  The freedom that I experienced in the enlightenment of “relational holiness” has been something that has changed the way that I do life.  God continues to lead me on this journey where I find my relationship with Christ interdependent of the body of Christ.  Now that I have discovered this, it is like I am stepping into to the person that I was always intended to be, a person that is part of something collective that is bigger then just myself.  John Wesley said it best when he said, “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness.”

I was sitting at a coffee shop with a friend of mine, listening to him share about his current struggles with a bunch of difficult situations.  At one point I started to say something and he stopped me and told me that he already knew that I was going to say something about being loving.  I had to laugh because he was right.  We are to love, why?  This is stated pretty well in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.”  I hope that my first response to people and the struggles of life can be love.  The kind of love that Oord and Lodahl talk about, a love that has to be lived out, practiced, a love that takes on flesh.