Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
As leaders, we lead others to honor God and to honor one another. A foundation for honor is friendship with God. Friendship with God will empower us to have a revelation of God’s love. Today I have decided to post and exert from my book Friendship With God – The Empowerment of Honor and Grace.
God has called us to be a part of something intimate and awesome. We are the body of Christ, the community of God in heaven and on earth. We are the place that has access to heaven and the place where heaven touches the earth. The body of Christ is made of life-giving relational connections. It is not merely a matter of Christian ministry. It is a matter of Christ-life relationships. For this reason, we must seek to develop and maintain healthy relationships with one another as the community of God.
I believe that we should treat all people with the value of belonging. Then we should demonstrate what the community of God looks like when we choose to embrace Jesus and one another as the testimony of God’s love and destiny in our lives. The true strength of this is seen in our friendship with God and with one another.
All life-giving relationships are created and sustained by a culture of honor. Honor as a noun is a tangible symbol given to another that signifies approval or distinction of who they are. It is recognizing who another is and demonstrating their value through attitudes and actions. When we give honor to someone, we give something of ourselves to approve and distinguish the value of who they are.
The value of each human being is that of being a one and only testimony as an expression of their Heavenly Father in this world. God gave His only begotten Son as the price of redemption for every person in the history of humanity. This is deserving of honor. Our honor for each person is an honor for the only begotten Son of God. It is an honor for the value that God has placed upon every person that has ever lived or will ever live upon the earth.
The community of God is a community that lives with honor toward one another, and it must therefore be a community of God that nurtures and exhibits a culture of honor. To be a culture of honor, a source of inspiring life must be within the substance of that culture. The source of ultimate honor is found in the place of knowing the friendship of God and growing in being a friend of God.
A culture of honor is a culture of truth, love, nobility, and recognition of others for who they are. In a culture of truth, we recognize who someone really is, but we don’t pretend they are something they are not. It is not honorable to recognize someone for who they are not. True honor is not something given to what someone thinks they are, it is something given to who they really are.
This includes an honor for ourselves. When we don’t know who we are, we don’t treat ourselves honorably. When we don’t know who another is, we don’t treat them honorably. It is dishonorable to put an identity upon someone that God did not give them. For this reason, true honor begins with knowing who God is. If we don’t know who God is, we won’t know who He says we are. We will end up giving ourselves false identities and then expect others to honor our deceptions. Showing value to another person doesn’t mean we must value their choices. Showing value for choices that produce dysfunction and a testimony of death is not the testimony of honor. Honor only works in truth.
Honor is also found in love. For this reason, a culture of honor always chooses life. A culture of honor deals with things that are wrong, but the focus is never on what is right or wrong. The focus of honor is always life! We must look at situations and always choose what will bring life.
A culture of honor must find its foundation in the tree of life, not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The family tree of the community of God is the tree of life. Therefore, our honor towards one another must be based upon a revelation of love. A culture of honor must be rooted in a revelation – a revelation of who another is and a revelation of love.
Familiarity is an enemy of honor because honor involves faith towards another. Sometimes natural experiences blind us to the truth of who someone is. When this happens, it is a test of our love for them. The opposite of faith is natural sight. When we base our honor towards another upon how they treat us, or how we perceive they treat us, we fall short in having an attitude of love towards them.
Faith only works through love and faith is demonstrated in our actions towards others. How we act toward others in a culture of honor is based upon a revelation of love and a testimony of faith. Without a revelation of love our actions will often be motivated by fear and fear is not an atmosphere that can be inhabited by honor. Honor lives in a culture and atmosphere of love. Only love can cast out fear and faith can only work in a culture of love.[1]
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
[1] Ted J. Hanson, Friendship With God – The Empowerment of Honor and Grace, (Bellingham, WA: House of Bread
Publishing, 2022), pp. 14-16.
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