Accountability and Encouragement

So we so often talk about how we should have accountability and encouragement in our lives and that we should hold each other accountable and always encourage/up lift each other. Well I've been thinking about this a lot this summer/year and realize that we have no idea what it means to encourage or keep each other accountable. Stuart Hall was the speaker this past week and he spoke on this one night. His words were profound and I knew that God was finally showing me what it meant to be encouraging and to keep somebody accountable. What Stuart said was that to encourage somebody does not mean to simply say, "Love ya" or "you can do it, keep going." But more than that; it means to lay your life down in front of that person. To keep somebody accountable we must lay our lives aside and stop at nothing to get that person on the right track or to help them stop doing what they're doing. That's what it means to be accountable. I can attest to that, and if there weren't people in my life that put themselves aside and continually were on my back about things, then I would not be where I am today. Accountability does not always have to be between two guys or two girls, while you can get more personal with those, it is also meant to be in a relationship. As I talked about in my last post, true Love has many facets and accountability and encouragement are some of them. This is because in order to Love somebody one must be willing to lay their life down for the better of that person. Another thing that comes along with this is that in order to truly be accountable you have to care more about that person than you do the relationship/friendship that you have with them. If you care more about the relationship/friendship that you have with them then you will never be able to keep that person accountable because you are more worried about the response of that person instead of what that person is doing. "Bear one another's burdens, and thereby fulfill the Law of Christ" ~Galatians 6:2~ Are you bearing the burden's of those around you or are you more worried about losing your socially bound friendship?

True Love

So what is Love? It's funny to think about how many things that we say we love. The English language has taken the word love and applied to many different things and unfortunately when it comes to the love between a man and a woman, it has lost its meaning. Love has so many meanings in today's society but what is true love between a man and a woman? In order to figure this out we must look to the Bible. In the Greek language there are several different words for our English word 'love.' The main three used to describe the love between a man and a woman are 'raya,' 'ahava,' and 'dod.' Raya literally translates as a friend or a companion, which is the basis of a love relationship. If there is no friendship and there is no companionship then there is no relationship. I have many rayas in my life but that is the only facet of love that we have. Ahava translates as love of the will. This means making a decision to join your life to the life of another. This is an emotion that leads to a commitment. In order to truly experience love we(men) are told to give up our lives for our wife as Christ did for the church (Ephesians 5:25-33); the wife gets to submit but the husband gets to die. Finally, there is dod. Dod means to carouse, rock, or to fondle. This is the physical, sexual element to a relationship that God designed for marriage. Without all three aspects listed above, it is hard to have true love in a marriage as God intended for us to have. One of the things that I have been taught to do, and it is amazing, is to turn to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 and to replace the word 'love' with my name and see if I have the attributes listed. God has called us to have those things in order to love. Are you ready to love?