For people with competitive personalities, their competitiveness can get out of hand when it leads to boasting or belittling others. Some people may think the competitiveness itself is to blame and ask, is it ok for Christians to be competitive? Or is it only bad to be overcompetitive? Are there better ways to compete? In Romans 12:10, the apostle Paul gives us one example of where we should be as competitive as we possibly can:
“Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”
When Paul says we should “outdo one another” he’s setting up a competition among believers, using a Greek word that means “to lead the way for others”[1] Paul is saying we should be trying our best to show more honor to others than others do. It’s a competition where everybody wins but doesn’t require participation trophies. We aren’t competing in worldly ways, to win honor for ourselves, but to honor others, or to esteem others as being of great value to us.
But also, I think Paul is referring to what came before in the verse: “Love one another with brotherly affection”. In this phrase, Paul combines two Greek words for love: one that means love for our figurative brothers, or people like us, and another that means love for our literal brothers, or close relatives. In the context of the church, this means to love other Christians as you love your own blood relatives. This makes sense because our Christian brothers and sisters are all permanent relations in Christ – maybe more permanent than our actual blood relatives.
Back to the full verse:
“Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”
Together, these phrases are telling us to do our best to love our fellow Christians as well as we possibly can, competing to do it better than others and to lead by example. We are to honor them because they are Christ’s, not because we get something in return.
So, yes, its ok to be competitive. Sometimes it’s even encouraged! Consider how to outdo others in love and showing honor today. Do your best to win today.
I recently had a very strange dream, which occurred (kind of) in the church I went to as a kid. This church, in Washington, D.C., has been around for over 130 years and meets in a stone building and has an amazing pipe organ in the main sanctuary. The appearance and structure of the church communicates permanence and tradition.
In this dream, I was roughly a teenager on one end of the church building but had to meet up with my family at the other end of the building. I started out in a place that seemed like the church I knew, but as I travelled to the other end, things got really bizarre. First, the size of the building seemed to keep expanding and the number of people in it kept multiplying. Soon I noticed that there was a gift shop selling all sorts of kitsch that had nothing to do with religion. I kept going in the same direction, trying to find my family, but the building just kept growing as I went, eventually having many levels, with huge moving walkways and escalators. The dream ended with me still in the church, but this end of it had become a very upscale, very massive, shopping mall. I remember wondering “how did the church turn into this?”
What to make of this? Consider what a shopping mall is. Yes, it’s a large collection of stores in one place, but not a random collection. Those stores were chosen to be as diverse as possible. The more of our desires and wants the mall can meet by having different types of stores, the more economically successful the mall will be, and that’s what matters to the mall operator. People want fancy clothes, jewelry, entertainment, snacks and candy, toys, and many other things. So, a mall can represent our “do whatever you want” culture.
I wonder if the seed of the dream was something I saw on Twitter a few days before: “There are infinite ways to be non-binary.” What they were saying is that not only are there not just two genders, but that we can endlessly create new ones with no limit at all. It’s like a sexual version of the shopping mall, and also a denial that there’s any real right or wrong or that there’s any such thing as an inappropriate desire. But can we really make ourselves into anything we want to be without consequences?
Consider this: no competent computer engineer would tell us that we can just arrange a diverse group of components any way we want and end up with a working computer. The engineer isn’t being intolerant or mean, they just know what it takes to make a computer do what it’s supposed to.
Likewise, when Jesus says “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,”[1] He is not being intolerant or mean by saying we can’t do whatever we want to, He just knows that we were designed, what we were designed to do, and also what will ultimately satisfy us.
Christian churches are supposed to teach us how to follow Christ, not tell us to do whatever we want to, but now many churches, just like in my dream, have turned into proverbial shopping malls. In many cases, we’ve forgotten that people are not accidents of random circumstances in nature, and we’ve forgotten that our Creator knows what’s best for us. We’ve decided to pursue “the way that is easy” forgetting that it “leads to destruction.” Too many churches, now including the one I went to in DC, say that Jesus will meet whatever needs we think we have, rather than saying that Jesus knows what we need better than we do; that it’s our idea of need that must be changed.
It’s our idea of need that must be changed
When Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” the “world” He loves is the one where we’ve come up with infinite ways to reject Him. Where we’ve come up with infinite ways to deny that He made us and knows better than us what’s right and wrong, what “leads to life” and what “leads to destruction.”
When God gave His Son, His sacrifice was sufficient for all sin and can cover all the infinite ways we decide to ignore what’s good for us. Because God loved this world, it’s also true that His people should communicate His love and grace at all times to all people, by word and action. Yet it’s also true that church is not a shopping mall regardless of what people can imagine in their dreams that it should be. The church is called to a higher standard of living, a holy standard informed by our Creator’s knowledge of what works.
So, in these troubling times, pray that people will continue to find Jesus, both within and outside the church and what much of it has become. That God’s people will love holiness, but also love sinners. Pray that we find the way that is hard but leads to life and that God’s church is a beacon calling people to it.
When describing His holiness, God provided pictures like the one in Isaiah 6:1 – “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” Because “the train of his robe filled the temple,” there is no room in the temple for anything that isn’t holy. Or in Revelation 15:8, which says: “and the sanctuary was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the sanctuary until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.” Until God’s judgment was complete – both on the unrepentant and on the cross for His people – there would continue to be no room in the sanctuary for anyone but the Lord.
How do these pictures apply to us? Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 – “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” Therefore, we ask ourselves: does the train of the Lord’s robe fill our temples?
A transformative moment came in my Christian life when I understood sin in contrast to holiness, rather than as a list of “don’ts.” It’s possible (perhaps even easy) to convince ourselves we are not sinners in need of grace by defining sin as things we don’t do. However, much of the time, the word “sin” in the New Testament is a translation of the Greek word hamartia, which means “to miss the mark.”[1] The word has athletic connotations, such as if an archer couldn’t hit the bullseye, they wouldn’t win the competition and the prize. As we all know, archers are supposed to be accurate, and if they aren’t, they’ve “missed the mark.”
Therefore, when Paul writes in Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” he is not saying everybody failed to follow a list of dos and don’ts, but that we have not fully lived the life God intended us to live. Romans 3:23 declares that while we wouldn’t set up idols in our church building, all of us tolerate some idols in our soul, which is where the Holy Spirit of God chooses to dwell. The train of His robe does not fill our inner temple, and we too often trod on it with dirty feet. We’ve “missed the mark” any time there’s other stuff in our temple, directing our thoughts and actions. However, by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ we have both a hope of living with God and a future where His metaphorical robe does fill us.
In Paradise, God’s people will – individually and collectively – “hit the mark” perfectly for eternity. His perfect temple will be completed in Paradise, with the living stones of all His people.
Paul returns to holiness again in 2 Corinthians 6:16 to 7:1, quoting several Old Testament passages, since holiness of His people has been the plan from the beginning –
“What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.’
Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.”
One of my favorite quotes on kindness is pretty simple: “Be kind. You never know what someone’s going through.” In their 1984 book Encouragement: The Key to Caring, Dr. Larry Crabb and Dr. Dan Allender write about how much of our interaction with others happens between layers we put on to hide our true selves, rather than between the deepest parts of our selves. We intentionally don’t let others know what we’re going through. Although the above quote probably wasn’t common when the book was written in 1984, the authors definitely had the idea in mind when they wrote about how we might imagine eavesdropping on the thoughts of others as we arrive at church on Sunday morning. Such imagining might help us realize how much encouragement and kindness everyone really needs. They wrote that we might hear thoughts like these:
“Oh, no! There’s Fred pulling up in his car. If he sees me, he’ll ask me for that committee report I haven’t done yet. I’d better move inside quickly and get seated.” “I wish my husband weren’t away on that business trip. It’s really uncomfortable coming to church without him. Well, I’ll just sit in the back and leave as soon as the service is over.” “I sure hope the preaching is better than it’s been the last few weeks.” “This should be a really good day. No work that needs to be done. I like our church and the football game is on TV at 3 this afternoon. That gives me time to take the family out to dinner and still be home for the kickoff. I really like being a Christian.” “I wonder if I should keep coming to this church. I really haven’t made any friends and the sermons don’t do much for me. Well I’ll keep praying about it and see how it goes today” “Look at that happy young family. It really hurts when I realize my kids are grown, gone, unsaved, and mixed-up. Boy, I wish I could have a few years back. Well I can’t start crying now. Cmon, smile-here comes Nancy to say hello.” “People think of me as a pretty spiritually together person. I’ll make a point to interact graciously and to respond in a biblical way to whatever happens.”[1]
While we can’t (and shouldn’t) eavesdrop on thoughts, imagining it reminds us that we really don’t know what’s going on behind other people’s layers, and they don’t usually know what’s behind ours.
Therefore, “Be kind. You never know what someone’s going through.”
[1] Crabb, Larry and Dan Allender. Encouragement: The Key to Caring (1984). P. 95-96.
The book of Acts, sometimes called the Acts of the Apostles, follows the four gospels in the New Testament and tells the story of the Christian church in its very early days. Luke, who wrote one of the gospels to “Theophilus”[1], is also the author of Acts, which he begins like this:
“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.”
Note that word “began.” Considering that the book of Luke ended with Jesus’ ascending into heaven[2], why does Luke write in Acts that Jesus “began to do and teach”? Because what Jesus did before leaving earth was only the beginning. Jesus’ activity in the gospels was only the start of His mission and story, and now He rules from the right hand of God the Father and continues to “do and teach” through His people by His Holy Spirit. He will continue to do this for all eternity.
Therefore, Jesus is still personally active in the world. Are you listening and learning through consistent prayer, Bible study and fellowship? See what He will continue to “do and teach” through you and His church!
