This is post 6 of 12 on Awakening to Authentic Community
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together makes this comment about the intimate connection between time alone and time together:
“We recognize, then, that only as we are within the fellowship can we be alone, and only he that is alone can live in the fellowship. Only in the fellowship do we learn to be rightly alone and only in aloneness do we learn to live rightly in the fellowship.”
How aware are you of the dynamic between your involvement with the church fellowship and your time alone with God? We need to be developing and growing our intimacy with God alone and we need to be developing our time within the fellowship of believers. I believe that for the most part the American church and therefore individual believers have not made the important connection between these two relationships. It is in our time with the fellowship of believers that we are taught, encouraged and exhorted. We are to take these things before God in our time alone with Him and ask the Holy Spirit to implement them within us. It is in our time alone with God that our hearts are prepared to receive and serve rightly within the fellowship of believers.
Each of us typically are either “time alone” people or we are “time together” people. You could also say we are either introverted or extroverted. But if we are going to grow in Christ and continue to be transformed by the Holy Spirit we must learn to grow in both areas realizing they are both dependent on each other.
In our time alone with God we should ask Him to prepare us for our time together with His Church to receive and serve. In our time of worship and fellowship with the Church we should ask God to give us revelation and insight to take deeper in our time alone with Him. If followers of Jesus would pray like this we would experience growth in both our “time alone” and our “time together.”
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