You don't know nothing about this, take me home, home, home, home. - Marc Broussard

Proverbs 14:10-Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.

Over the past year of my life, I have spent countless hours processing the idea of what community is and can be, and the possibilities that exist to have a deeper experience of God through our relationships with one another. Others and myself have dialogued, prayed, look at scripture, and wrestled greatly with this reality and have asked the Lord to reveal to us what it is that true “gospel-centered, transformational community” looks like.

It is within this context that the above verse was brought to me by the Lord through meditation on the scriptures one day in the past month, and through the Holy Spirit’s revelation, I felt as though I had stumbled upon something so true and pure it terrified me. And that some things are so true you have to learn them again every day.

The gospel-centered, transformational community that I have been seeking to understand and desiring to cultivate for our church is ultimately subservient to a community with Christ himself that isn’t just beneficial to, but wholly essential to the formation of the latter. Simply put, if my community with Christ himself isn’t growing at least to the degree that my community with others within whom Christ dwells is, the community with others is destined to disappoint.

Avoiding disappointment isn’t the object of what I am stating, rather a seemingly subtle, yet massively important shift, is the nature of this revelation and consequent invitation. Namely, do you understand your need to experience the person of Christ firsthand, and the catastrophic impact of not doing so, on even the greatest most godly of relationships.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book life together states talks about our “life together under the Word.” It is a simple statement but carries with it massive implications for it assumes that for us as Christ followers, true community is only had when both parties are “under” the Word. Another way of stating this is that the vantage point from which we view relationships and our lives together is viewed exclusively through the lens of scripture. The problem with that is that we have in modern times treated scripture as a text to be learned, rather than a relationship to be experienced. It is the difference between approaching scripture for information to take with us and go “work”, or approaching scripture relationally for formation, that the truth found within the scriptures needs to and can “work” us.

John 1:14-The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

It is hard at times to remember that when we approach scripture we aren’t coming to a text to be mastered, but to be mastered by a person who in Spirit inhabits our very selves and purposes to transform not just our minds but bodies into His very likeness. We come to scripture be taught not to self-teach. We come to receive, not to self-discover, to be revealed to, not self-enlighten. We come to experience someone rather than learn about them. And if we don’t, we will and do spend all of our lives seeking that experience though something temporal and unable to fulfill our desire. And why is because the desire inside of us is not something we conjure, but something lodged within the very fabric of our selves by God himself.

Ecclesiastes 3:11b- He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

This is why understanding Proverbs 14:10 is so essential. Without a daily experiential recognition of the fact that no one but Christ himself knows the depths of my heart, the sorrow that resides there, and the joy that it experiences, I will undoubtedly look to something or some one temporal to satisfy this eternal longing. It is only living first personally “under His Word” that we then are able to receive and cultivate healthy, gospel-centered, transformational community. It is only when through our community with Christ himself, and his transformation of us, that we can move into “life together” with one another and not make an idol of community, and consequently killing it and ourselves, trying to get from it, what it cannot give.