Trust and Friendship between Men

Tonight our men from Calvary Chapel Montebello will be meeting for their first summer meeting of FMO, For Men Only fellowship. My prayers and thoughts are with them and for them.

The FMO organizers chose to go with a book by Tom L. Eisenman, The Accountable Man. A very good choice, I might add.

I was given the book about a month ago. It’s an easy read, and very meaningful. I hope and prayerfully desire that the contents of the author’s main directive, ‘Accountability,’ would be grasped, and then fully cultivated and developed by all of our church men.

James, inspired by the Holy Spirit, stated something very powerful, intended for all Christians, but much more applicable, in our case, for man to man and their intended accountability with one another: “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (James 5:16). Healed? Healed from what? The contextual content, commencing from verse 13, is a spiritual, healing restoration and not limited to the physical. Prayer, oil-anointing, confession, admission and fellowship are all intertwined, completing a mutual concern for one Christian to another, in order to battle discouragement and downfall.

All of the subject matters needed for a genuine friendship and healthy relationship are wonderfully and properly treated by the author: Genuineness, Honesty, Authenticity, Trust and my favorite one, Vulnerability: “Vulnerability is a quality of conscience. It is reflected in a man who is sensitive, able to be wounded by personal sin, willing to be shown where he is wrong. It is the quality identified in 1 Timothy 1:5 as having “a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” A sign that a man is maturing in this quality of conscience is that he will be quick to admit sin and error even before he is confronted with his wrongdoing. Vulnerability describes a willingness to open one’s life up to another. This is an area of struggle for most men. If we are at all insecure about ourselves, we will be tempted to cover up the truth or color our life situation to make ourselves look better. We might admit a certain area as a trouble spot in our lives, but then we pretend to make progress in this area when we’re really up against a wall.”

For the last two weeks many of our men have been genuinely excited about their personal involvement in this coming week’s Somebody Loves You Crusades in Lost Angeles. In light and view of the current newspaper headlines, the event is a breath of fresh air to the morally-smoggy city of angels.

Praying for our men and SLY, bigtime!