A living, breathing, culture of honour is our goal as a community of faith as individuals. Put simply this culture is about living out our true identities and co-labouring with Jesus to help our brothers and sisters in Christ live out their true identities.
It is about helping those in our sphere of influence live out their true identities even if they are unaware of their identity. For me as a leader in our local church I see my primary role, and if you are a leader in any way shape or form your primary role as a leader in this culture – is to empower the saints to know God and walk in the fulness of who God says they are!
Danny Silk says, and I quote
“As we live like this (as empowerers) faith matures and courage builds so that we join Jesus in bringing heaven to earth.”
He goes on to say,
“One way we empower the saints
is to create a safe place to do life and mission”
This safe place is where failure and fault is not met with punishment and where the goal is to remove shame from people who failed/stumbled through loving them.
The call on our lives is to keep our love on regardless.
Shame keeps people trapped, people living in shame are convinced they are powerless to do anything. Our role is to help people be powerful to be responsible and take action to clean up their mess if there is one.
A key ingredient in ‘a living culture of honour’, is necessarily forgiveness. It plays a huge role in this process in this culture as does genuine repentance [not just remorse] but repentance.
In this culture we need to remember how Jesus behaved toward people – he lived a life that was out fear. If we can live with our love on then we can be humble and vulnerable before friends/peers, then we are able to trust people with our stuff. As we trust our lives with one another we create a culture of honour.