PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | Episode 106: TOGETHERNESS, Part 3
FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell
EPISODE 106: TOGETHERNESS, Part 3
Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.
Nancy Campbell: Hello ladies. It’s a beautiful day here in Tennessee. I’m in my lounge here with you today and as I look out the window in front of me all I can see is the beautiful green trees. If I look out behind me there are green trees. Beautiful trees surround our whole house. It is so wonderful to look out upon them.
Today we are continuing our third session on the subject of TOGETHERNESS. It is such a wonderful subject; it is a subject that is part of the lifestyle of the Kingdom of God.
Today we are going to look at point number 20. Yes, I got to 20 points.
No. 20. MUTUAL FAITH WITH ONE ANOTHER
This Scripture that is found in Romans 1:12 says: “That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.”
Paul was writing to the Romans and he was writing previously to these words saying, “I long to come to you. I want to come and bestow spiritual gifts upon you to help you grow. I want to come and be encouraged by you and you will be encouraged by me.”
I love the words that are used here: Mutual faith.
I have read the Word of God so many times, but I had forgotten about these two words. I hadn’t picked them up in a long time: Mutual Faith. And this is what it is all about, dear ladies. Our faith is a mutual faith.
We have been looking at Scriptures in the last two sessions and now we get to this last one and here we see it again.
Yes, we have a personal faith in Christ but it’s also a mutual faith where we go along this road together, strengthening one another, and encouraging one another. Regular hospitality and the regular gathering together for church are essential for the strengthening of our faith. We have been seeing this over and over again.
Paul says, “When I come to you, we will be comforted together.”
Do you notice that again? We have this word, “Together,” continually—“Come together.” “When you come together.” “When you came together.” Here he says, “We are comforted together.”
The word in the Greek is symparakaleōv and it means: “To console jointly, to comfort together.”
You see, it’s not something that we do in isolation. It’s something we do together. We comfort and encourage one another jointly.
The Greek word for the two words “mutual faith” is a very important word, too. In the Greek it is allēlōn and this is what it means: “Reduplicated, one another, each other, together.” You see, our faith is a “one another” faith.
This Greek word that is translated as “mutual faith” here is mostly translated throughout the New Testament over and over again. It usually says:
“one another,
one to another,
one toward another,
one with another,
one of another,
one for another,
members one of another.”
This is the full meaning and it’s shared over and over again. It’s the lifestyle of the Kingdom of God. If we belong to God’s Kingdom we belong to the lifestyle of the “one another” lifestyle.
Let’s look at some other translations.
The Holman Translation says: “That is, to be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”
The Amplified Classic says: “ . . . that we may be mutually strengthened and encouraged and comforted by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”
As I am sharing with you today on this podcast, I am here sitting in my lounge here in Tennessee. You are somewhere else in this world. Ladies are listening from many countries of the world. I am encouraging you and I trust you are being encouraged. That’s good ,but really, ladies, to truly encourage one another means to be together. That’s the full meaning of it.
Paul says, “I love to come to you so we can be mutually encouraged both with your faith and with my faith.” We get together and we speak about Jesus. We encourage one another. We tell the stories of what God has been doing in our lives.
My daughter, Evangeline, she calls it, “My God stories.” When she’s with people she will say to them, “Well, what’s your latest God story?” Sometimes they don’t have any so she will say, “Well I’ll tell you my God story!”
She always has God stories—amazing things and miraculous things that are happening in her life and in the life of her family.
That’s what it’s meant to be. We’re experiencing God day by day and we don’t keep it to ourselves, we share it with one another. We share our God stories and we are encouraged by each other.
FACE TO FACE AND SIDE BY SIDE
I love The Passion Translation of this Scripture. It says: “ I yearn to come and be face-to-face with you and get to know you. For I long to impart to you the gift of the Spirit that will empower you to stand strong in your faith. Now, this means that when we come together [you see, the coming together, this is where it happens) side by side, something wonderful will be released. We can expect to be co-encouraged and co-comforted by each other’s faith!”
I notice two phrases there: “face to face” and “side by side.” They are powerful phrases, dear ladies.
Face to face . . . real fellowship only happens face to face. When we get side by side that’s when we can really encourage one another. We’re coming along side.
We found the meaning of that included the word paraklētos from paraklēt, the Comforter, that’s the Greek word for the Holy Spirit Who is the Comforter. He’s called the Comforter. He comes alongside us to comfort us.
But this word is also used for us coming alongside one another to comfort and encourage one another.
We do this in our family because everything starts in the family. If we haven’t got it together in the family, we’re not going to get it together in church life. Church life is an extension of the family.
That’s why we eat our meals together as a family because we are then having face-to-face fellowship. It is sad that many families today eat their meals and they’re not looking face-to-face. Maybe they are sitting in front of the TV or maybe they are sitting in their bedroom in front of the computer.
Maybe they’re in the car coming back from sports or some other thing. It’s getting late and mother doesn’t have time to prepare a meal, so they just get some fast food, and everybody eats in the car. One brother is just looking at the head of his brother in front of him. That’s not reality. That is not what eating is meant to be about.
Did you know that eating is not just meant to be eating? Eating is coupled with fellowship. It’s face-to-face table fellowship.
Dear mothers, we’ve got to start in our homes and start that habit. I know that you do this as much as you can but do it even more as much as you can. Make it a habit.
When you eat your meals, you gather your family around your table. They sit at the table, you are around the table, you are looking at one another and conversing with one another. You are face-to-face. It’s face-to-face table fellowship.
I love the Scripture in Psalm 128:3 where God gives a picture of the mother in the home. He says: “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.”
God, Who is so practical, Who loves the family, Who loves families to sit around the table, He paints that picture. This is the picture of the family that is blessed by the Lord. When the children are all around and they are face-to-face. They are not only eating food, but they are conversing and having heart and soul communication face-to-face.
Remember those phrases: “face to face” and “side by side.” We start them in the family. They are part of our family life. Then we continue that same spirit and that same lifestyle in our church life.
THE LIFESTYLE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
You see, hospitality, meeting with one another, encouraging one another, getting side by side with one another, that is all church life. That’s the lifestyle of the Kingdom of God. This is what we see in the Word of God. If we’re not doing this in our homes, how will we do it in the church?
Sadly, today’s church often becomes a place where we come to maybe have a bit of entertainment and hear a message, but we don’t do much more than that. That’s only a small part of church life. It is meant to be this interaction, this togetherness, this mutual faith both of my faith and your faith together.
Are you getting the message, ladies?
Of course if we’re going to be coming together, yes, we can just have fellowship. But, often, real fellowship takes place over a meal, doesn’t it? That’s real fellowship. The greatest fellowship you can have is sitting around a table over a meal, eating together and talking together. I think we need to have more and more of that in our church life.
That has always been part of our church life throughout all of our married lives. There have been different seasons, of course.
My husband is a pastor and he has pastored many different churches. Sometimes we haven’t had what you would call a “Love Feast” or a fellowship meal after church. Sometimes everybody just has gone home to their homes. If that has been the case, we have always asked people home to sit around our table after church. We have always opened our home to the people of God on Sunday.
Currently at our church fellowship here, we have a fellowship meal. Everybody brings a dish and we all eat together, and we fellowship together, and hang out together, often for most of the afternoon.
I believe that Sunday is the Lord’s Day. It’s the day we give to the Lord. We give that time to come together, to worship, to hear the Word from God, but also to encourage one another, to be face-to-face and come together side by side.
We get together, talk and hear one another’s burdens, share one another’s joys and catch up with one another.
Of course, when you do that, it takes a little extra work. You have to prepare something to eat. There is serving one another and cleaning up. That all takes work. Often people today are not prepared for that little bit of extra work. They just want cookie-cutter Sundays. They go to church, worship, hear the Word, get home and do their own thing. No, that’s not how it’s meant to be, and it never was for centuries until this modern day in which we’re living.
Church is not just something we do. But no— it’s lifestyle. We have to get back to the lifestyle of the Kingdom of God.
We have our church in a big room underneath our home. It started as our Above Rubies packaging room, but we’re so blessed to have this room because we use it for all of our family gatherings, which can get up to about 80 or more people. We can pack in about 100 people in this big fellowship room, so we are able to have our church fellowship here, which is so wonderful.
But you know, in doing that, of course there is wear and tear on the home. I would say that every Sunday we get another chair broken.
When you open your home in hospitality, not only on Sunday but also throughout the week, and you have people and families, children will knock, and break things and things wear and tear.
Are you prepared for this? It’s all part of coming together, our one anothering. It’s what we’re meant to do. It’s real life.
This Greek word for “mutual faith” as I said is usually is translated “one another” or “one to another” or ”one for another” and so on.
31 ONE ANOTHER SCRIPTURES
I found, lovely ladies, as I checked out all these “one another” Scriptures, do you know how many I found? In just the New Testament, I found 31 different things that God has told us in His Word to do to one another.
Thirty-one is one for every day of the month—you’ve got a different thing that God wants us to do to one another.
I’m going to share these 31 “one another’s” with you because there they are in the Word. Maybe you sometimes miss them so let’s put them all together.
These “one another’s,” once again, start in the home. If we could begin to put them into practice, we can have a beautiful heavenly atmosphere in our home.
If we could begin to put them to practice in the church, I think we would begin to have revival in the church.
Are you ready for them?
I won’t give you all the Scriptures because many of them have more than one Scripture, but I’ll tell you what I do. We have transcripts for our podcasts. They usually come a couple of weeks later because I have two beautiful, wonderful ladies who transcribe these podcasts. They do it out of love. I am so grateful. It takes a lot of time. It can take about four hours to transcribe one of these podcasts.
One is a precious mother. The other is a young single girl. She was one of my Above Rubies helpers. One does the even numbers and one does the odd numbers. They give of their time to do this for you.
When I started doing podcasts I thought, “Wow, this will be great! I can just share my heart.” Then can you believe it? I got people emailing in and saying, “I don’t have time for podcasts. I need a transcript.”
I thought, “Oh goodness me, how much more work do I have to do?” Anyway, the Lord graciously provided these wonderful, wonderful ladies who do it so freely. Then I also go over it again.
But it takes them a couple of weeks so a couple of weeks after the podcast you can go to the website, www.aboverubies.org. On the home page you can click on “Our Home to Yours” and then you will find the transcripts. I will put all the Scriptures in this transcript so you will get all the Scriptures.
You can look them up and see that this is the Word of God. Not just one Scripture but many, many, many Scriptures. (Now you are reading the transcript I would encourage you to take time to look up the Scriptures and meditate on them. The Scriptures give life. They release us into truth. They show us the way to go. Get them into your heart).
Here we go, number one: BLESS ONE ANOTHER
Maybe I’ll talk about a few of them. I better not get talking about all of them or we’ll never get through them all, will we?
But I do want to take you to this one, 1 Peter 3:9: “Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing . . ..”
In other words, when people speak against you, when people rail against you, when people say nasty and untruthful words about you, what do you do?
I mean this is reality. We all face this. I don’t think there is one of us who have not had spiteful things said against us, about us, or to us. Many times they’re not true and you can feel, “Wow, how can they say these things?” You feel so lousy and you can feel indignant: “How dare they say those things?” You just want to get them back and get them straight.
I love another translation of this Scripture and it actually says those words: “Pay them back!” I love that, don’t you?
But what does it say after that? To “pay them back with a BLESSING.” Isn’t that amazing? You see, this is God’s way and God gives us strategies. He gives us the answer for everything we face in life. We’re all going to face this and we’ll most probably face it again.
Someone says these awful things about you. They really hurt you into the very core of your being. We dare not let that hurt go into us. We dare not ever become bitter because it will not only ruin your soul, but it will ruin the souls of your children. If we allow bitterness and hurt and anger to stay with us, it comes out of us and it’s horrible. It comes out on your children.
We as mothers have got to keep a pure spirit because if our spirit is contaminated it will contaminate our children and so we have to guard. If you are holding unforgiveness, you can’t ever hold unforgiveness no matter what people have done or said. You can’t because it only destroys you.
You have got to bless them. I don’t know how many times I have had to be down on my knees saying, “Oh God, bless them.” I say the person’s name. “Bless them, Lord. I pray God’s blessings on them.”
It’s an amazing thing because as you do that, it frees your spirit. You get free of the hurt! Also in the spirit realm, that blessing works and somehow it works on that person.
I can remember once, years and years and years ago, someone saying these very derogatory things. I remember her looking at me and I could see that sort of hatred in her face and oh, that went so deep.
But I knew God’s Word. I knew what I had to do and sometimes you don’t feel like doing it but you don’t do anything by feelings, you do what God says, whether you feel like it or not. You might feel mad with them but that doesn’t matter. You get down on your knees and say, “God bless them.” You keep saying it until you can get up off your knees and know you can look them in the eye and say it to them.
I did this and of course this doesn’t mean that you have to do this once. You have to keep doing it because this Scripture is written in the present tense. Sometimes you will get the victory and then it comes back again. You feel all mad again. Down on your knees you go again, and you bless them again.
Say in your heart, “Lord bless them. Bless them.”
The months went by for quite a long time and I met this woman again. I couldn’t believe it. It was as though nothing had happened. She looked at me and smiled. She gave me a hug. She had forgotten. She had gotten free and I had gotten free. We were both free!
This is how it works, ladies. We have to do a lot of blessing in our families. We have to do a lot of blessing in the body of Christ because it’s easy to be hurt by one another because we are not all perfect. We say the wrong thing. I’ve most probably hurt people as they have hurt me.
But if we can get this principle, then we can live how God wants us to live.
Here is a very sad story: My father was one of five boys. Godly parents brought him up, well, after his father got converted. His father was a wild man before he got converted. He had a wonderful conversion and then he began to raise his sons in the ways of God. They all grew up to marry wonderful Christian wives.
I can remember living life with my cousins and all going to church together.
But someone said something to the oldest brother, and he got offended. He obviously didn’t apply this principle and bless that person. Instead the hurt went into him and he left the church. He never went back to church.
I can remember my father going to him and pleading with him saying, “Brother, what about your children? What are you going to do about them? They’re not even hearing the Word of God.”
He said to my father, “Don’t worry. When they’re old enough I will take them to a Gospel meeting. They will hear the Gospel and decide for themselves.” Well, they grew up and he never got to take them to that Gospel meeting. Those children grew up never darkening a church door, never knowing salvation, and never walking with God.
There were many divorces and now their children are not walking with God. And now there is another generation and they are not walking with God.
All the other brothers continued in the faith and all of their children are walking with God right down to this day with us. We are now in the fourth generation with great-grandchildren coming along and they are still walking with God.
That one brother, that family has not walked with God from the day he left the church because he got offended.
Look at all those lives without God, without enjoying eternity with Christ forever, all because of an offense. How we have to watch that.
Oh, let’s be those who bless one another. This is part of our mutual faith.
It’s not all going to be perfect. It hasn’t been, and isn’t now, and never will be until we meet Jesus. So let’s put into operation the way that we can live, blessing one another.
Actually I started with “bless” and I should have started with an “A.” I’ve actually got them in alphabetical order.
So going back . . .
No. 1. ACCEPT ONE ANOTHER (Romans 15:7 HCSB).
With all of our idiosyncrasies and the things that drive us crazy about one another, no, we accept one another.
No. 2. BEAR ONE ANOTHER’S (Galatians 6:2 and Colossians 3;13). The Amplified
Version states: “Bearing graciously with one another.”
No. 3. BLESS ONE ANOTHER (Matthew 5:44 and 1 Peter 3:9).
No. 4. CARE FOR ONE ANOTHER (1 Corinthians 12:25).
No. 5. COMFORT ONE ANOTHER (1 Thessalonians 4:18 and 2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
No. 6. Have COMPASSION ON ONE ANOTHER (1 Peter 3:8).
No. 7. CONFESS YOUR FAULTS ONE TO ANOTHER (James 5:16).
No. 8. CONSIDER ONE ANOTHER (Hebrews 10:24
No. 9. ENCOURAGE ONE ANOTHER (Hebrews 3:13 and 10:25 AMP, HCSB, and NASB).
Oh how important that is. Encouragement is such a powerful thing. We start doing it in our own families, in our family lives. How can we encourage people in the body of Christ if we aren’t’ in the habit of encouraging one another in our family life?
First of all, in our marriage: Do you encourage your husband every day? Did you tell him today, “I love you”? That is part of daily life. Did you know that husbands so need encouragement? They are like little puppy dogs with their tongues hanging out just flapping waiting for encouragement. They thrive on it.
Your husband will grow to be who God wants him to be, not by your nagging at him or getting at him but by your encouraging him, by speaking words of encouragement and speaking words of love. Try to do it every day. You will be amazed what will happen.
Proverbs 12:25 in The Living Bible says: “ . . . a word of encouragement does wonders!” It can do miracles. It can save a marriage. Get into the habit of it.
Get into the habit of encouraging your children. They do so many stupid things and we seem to always be on them saying, “Don’t do this” and “Don’t do that.”
Yes, we have got to keep them in line, but I have found if you can encourage them in the fine moments, even when they are happy and not doing something crazy, encourage them!
Say, “Oh! You are such a happy boy! Mummy is so blessed to have you. I love your smile! I get blessed all over when you smile.”
When they do some little thing, or even in their schoolwork, just encourage them: “Oh you’re amazing, that’s fantastic!”
Let it flow from your lips, the spirit of encouragement.
I was blessed to have been brought up with a spirit of encouragement. My father especially encouraged us children. His encouragement to me, I believe, prepared me for what I am today. I was a bit of a hopeless child, but he saw something in me beyond anything I saw in myself.
He encouraged me. He encouraged me beyond what I thought I was capable of. That encouragement worked.
That was just part of life for me, so I encouraged our children. Both my husband and I became encouragers of our children. Sometimes I wonder if I encouraged them too much because there wasn’t a thing, they didn’t think they could do! They grew up thinking there was nothing that was impossible. They have done many impossible things that people say, “Oh you can’t do that.” But they did them because they thought, “Oh well, you can do anything.”
Encouragement is powerful. I believe it is the rich soil in which we grow our children to their full potential.
We do it in our families and then we get to church. We get to the body of Christ. When we get together, what do we do? Encourage each one we meet. We’ve got a little word of encouragement for them to bless them and build them and lift them up.
Imagine, imagine, imagine, ladies, if every one of us, as we are going back to church now that we are all getting back together, if everyone comes with a word of encouragement for each one and everybody is encouraging each other. Can you believe how the body is going to be lifted up and how they are going to go home filled not only with something from the Word but encouragement from one another.
This will release revival!
I am running out of time again, but we will carry on next session.
“Dear Father, We thank You for Your Word, Your Word which shows us how to live, Your Word, which is practical. It comes down to the nitty-gritty of our lives.
“Thank You for showing us. Thank You for these ‘one another’s.’ Thank You for showing us how to bless and encourage one another and care for one another.
“We pray that You will help us to live this lifestyle. We ask it in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.”
Transcribed by Morgan Roth.