Redeemer Fellowship Johnson County

Because our citizenship is of another kingdom and our allegiance is to another king, Christian engagement in the politics of our world should be shaped by the ethics and hope of the kingdom of Jesus.

Human beings were created for relationships, and are created by them. Though words like ‘friendship’, ‘relationship’, and ‘community’ are ubiquitous in our culture — both inside the church and outside — honest assessment requires us to admit that we are far more acquainted with isolation and fragmented relationships than we are with community and friendship. Mother Teresa, who spent her life serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, said that the worst disease she encountered was not leprosy, AIDS, or cancer, but loneliness.

Where can we experience true intimacy? Precisely because we were created for intimacy with God and with one another, friendship is a central theme in the Bible — featured more prominently than marriage or parenting. As such, God’s word provides us both with portraits of friendship as well as postures through which we can cultivate friends. Most importantly, the Bible narrates for us the grand account of God’s work to reconcile us to Himself in Christ. In Jesus, we find true friendship with God and the ability to experience intimacy with God and with those around us.

Marriage is a gift from God through which he allows human beings to bear witness to and display the mystery of the good news of his love to us in Christ. That means the goal of marriage is to bear witness to the essence of the living God AND ultimately to bear witness to the story of redemption he has planned and is accomplishing to all of creation. Therefore, all human marriages are a metaphor of the mystery of the gospel. The gift of marriage, every time we see it, is a signpost pointing the way home to glory if we have the faith to see it.

We are created as men or as women to inhabit our gendered bodies unto the glory of God. This requires that we understand our differences, delight in our equality, steward our particular gendered strengths, and respect the gendered weakness of the opposite sex.

Gender is foundational to God’s intentions in creation and inherent to our embodied humanity. The distinctions between male and female are both inevitable and beautiful. In order to flourish as humans, we must embrace God’s good design for us and understand that gendered relationships between male and female require us to steward the tension between equality and difference. Historical and present crises alike are characterized by human attempts to remove the tension altogether.