The Inner Ring

This article, at first glance, seemed almost trivial to me. Of course there are inner rings, it is incredibly necessary for anything to run properly. And, yes, people need to be excluded from these inner rings. This is one of many set backs to living in a fallen world, you must be able to protect yourself, your church, your government, or your military. If the world were not fallen... You could say that about anything. But we must acknowledge that the world is fallen, and we must make the appropriate adjustments.

I noticed quickly, however, that this article was not talking about the trivial aspect of the inner ring (even though if you take living for the Kingdom seriously, nothing is trivial). This article was speaking to the problems of the inner ring, and the one that seemed to be the root of every problem was motives. Motives of exclusion, and motives for being part of an inner ring.

Lewis says that if you desire to be in an inner ring, you are desiring something folly. To desire something that would put you in an inner ring is fine, but only if being in the inner ring is a consequence, not a goal. He also said that if you exclude for the sake of exclusion, that is also wrong.

The terrible side to this is that we all are parts of bad inner rings (or perhaps the inner ring itself is good, but we have bad motives behind the inner ring and exclusion). Often times we do not even notice this, but that is because nobody voices this problem, and as a result, we do not examine our inner rings. We have doctors examine our bodies to ensure our physical health, but we never examine our inner rings to ensure our spiritual health, which is far more important.

Jesus even had an inner circle, he had a very good inner circle. It was humility that earned this inner circle, in order to live with Jesus you lived homeless, you were persecuted, it was almost an inner circle that nobody wanted to be in (at times at least). How many were persecuted in the name of Jesus?

Another thing you can observe about Jesus' circle is that it was very open to sharing. Not particularly inviting people to join, but Jesus never turned people away who wanted to hear him, not even the children. His disciples wanted to be exclusive by sending away the children, but Jesus let them come. You can also observe, on the same topic, how Jesus had the necessary exclusivity in his circle.

Only by observing Jesus' circle, and striving in every way to be Christlike would we be able to attain an inner circle even close to being good. Jesus set the example, and let us now follow.

In Christ,

Ben