Dr. Mark Rutland is the new president of Oral Roberts University and the author of Nevertheless: The Most Powerful Word You Can Use to Defeat the Enemy .
John Wesley said, “I know of no holiness save social holiness.” He meant that we do not live out our piety in relationship with God alone but in community with others. The downside of community is that no one can test your sanctification like your brother-in-law, the antichrist. The upside is that just when you are ready to collapse under the unbearable weight of grief and suffering, Titus shows up with love letters from Corinth.
Some believers tend to so over-spiritualize their faith that the relational aspect gets lost in the glow. Jesus painfully peeled away the soft spiritual goo to reveal the hard core realities of relational holiness as no other teacher ever has. Probably, that was a large part of what got Him killed.
The golden thematic thread that runs through the entire tapestry of the Sermon on the Mount is relational holiness. In that great teaching, theology (spiritual theory) was not Jesus’ point. It was human application (spiritual practices). He was teaching, not about what we ought to believe, but about how we should act, love, live, and forgive. You want to get folks angry enough to kill you, just leave the theoretical realm and deal with horizontal, relational reality. Preach on love and win medals. Talk to a man about how he treats his mother-in-law and wind up nailed to the wall.
Jesus taught that everything, even, or perhaps especially, offerings to God, must be seen in the light of human relationships. “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” (Matt. 5:23-24)
The Bible never envisioned our being reconciled to God apart from our being reconciled to each other. No amount of spiritual language can change that. Nevertheless beautifully bridges the gap between the spiritual and the pragmatic.
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