Inner Circle Joy

(Photo: dreamstime.com)

Dear brothers and sisters, pattern your lives after mine, and learn from those who follow our example.—Philippians 3:17, NLT

Reading Romans 16 is not unlike attending your child’s school awards ceremony and clapping for a bunch of people you know nothing about. It can be a little awkward: “I don’t know who these people are, but ‘yay for them’ anyway.” For the first 16 verses, the Apostle Paul encourages the fledgling gathering of believers in Rome, who like us,  “are beloved of God … called to be saints (God’s people) and set apart for a sanctified life; that is, set apart for God and His purpose,” to be sure to “greet” a whole lot of folks who they apparently know or have at least heard of, but who are total strangers to us.

But maybe they shouldn’t be.

These are mostly everyday people, with no special qualifications other than that they all seem to not just talk a good game, but consistently (not perfectly) walk the talk. These are men and women whose lives are marked not just by good deeds but by:

Faithfulness in both sunny and rainy seasons

Perseverance when everything inside screams to quit

Integrity even when compromise is everywhere

Hard work, very hard work, whatever it looks like, for the sake of spreading Good News

For being family to one another...encouraging, building up, loving

For random acts of hospitality

And, especially, whose very lives have been “tested and approved in Christ.”

When Paul says “greet” these folks, he’s implying a whole lot more than “Tell ‘em ‘hi’ for me.” The Greek word implies a very intimate greeting—to hug, to kiss with honor, to embrace. That may all sound rather uncomfortable if you’re not a particularly greeting-demonstrative person, but God chose a strong word for a very good reason:

In this journey on the Great Adventure, with deceptions, lies, and temptations lurking around every corner 24/7, it’s vital that we find and walk with those who have lived like the just-a-regular-guy saints in that Romans 16 list. And not only to find them and walk with them, but to go a bold step further and “embrace” them into a very tight circle of joyful influencers. Not at the exclusion of all others, but as Solomon penned many hundreds of years earlier—perhaps pointing to that early gathering of believers in Rome as well as to we who are called to be salt and light today—

"Walk with the wise and become wise;
    associate with fools and get in trouble."—Proverbs 13:20, NLT

“Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are."

(Author unknown)

[ADAPTED FROM 4-10-16]