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THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN® LIFE Daily Devotional
July 26, 2004

Together Forever
by John Fischer

A friend of mine has written a tongue-in-cheek song about a certain 
reluctance to go home for Christmas due to the strained relationships that 
always seem to characterize these once-a-year family get-togethers. I have 
witnessed his performance of this song numerous times, and every time it 
receives a boisterous response from the audience. If the perfect family 
exists somewhere, I haven’t found it yet, and I would venture to guess you 
haven’t either. It stands to reason, therefore, that our spiritual families 
will be plagued by the same limitations that characterize our physical 
families. There is no perfect small group, no perfect church, no perfect 
community.

The issue for our fellowship, therefore, is not to be free of problems, but 
to be free of pretense. Conflict, disagreements or differences of opinion 
are not the enemy of good relationships—dishonesty is. We can go through 
anything together if we are committed to two things—the truth about 
ourselves, and the permanency of our relationships in the Body of Christ.

These two things are absolutely necessary for a good relationship: telling 
the truth, and a tenacious refusal to walk away. My wife and I have a joke 
about this. We tell people that we have simply decided that divorce is out 
of the question as a solution to our problems: “Murder maybe, but not 
divorce!”

Imagine if we had the same tenacity towards each other in the Body of 
Christ What would happen if the ending or the avoidance of any relationship 
in Christ were simply not an option.

If you think about it, even if we make it an option, it has to be only 
temporary, because we are all headed to our eternal home in heaven where 
all differences, factions and grudges will be erased forever. Like we used 
to say in the Jesus movement: We’re going to be together forever, so we 
might as well start getting used to each other now. There are no exit doors 
in the family of God.

PDL

John Fischer is an author, speaker, and song writer based in Southern 
California. His latest book, Love Him in the Morning has been released by 
Revell Publishing.


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