Following on from the previous post, there is a second point that comes to mind related to cities and honour/shame and the comment by RC Sproul Jr......
2. Although fear of shame before others should never be our primary behaviour motivation, but rather our shame or honour before God should be highest, Scripture gives indication that the reality of our propensity to feel shame before others is not something to totally disregard.
Our love for others is closely linked with and not detached from our love for God. But just as we can know love from God by knowing love from people around us, it is also true that there is a form of shame before others that is not in conflict with shame before God.
Scripture seems to say that if we are ignoring our need to feel shame for sin before God, that God will use our propensity to feel shame before people as a means to help us begin to see the seriousness of our sin.
This is not least in the context of the people being the people of God - Christ's body. There is a sense in which what is shameful in the eyes of God should also be shameful in the eyes of His body on earth - the church. 2 Thessalonians 3:13 is an example of this where the Apostle Paul specifically says that those in the church who refuse to obey the Word should be taken note of, and as like a warning to a brother (as opposed to an enemy), the other believers should have nothing to do with that person, so that the person will be ashamed. The fact that other believers in the context of the local church might 'see' us or 'know' us is meant to be part of the prompting and reminder to us that God sees and God knows. Our sin cannot be hidden away in some corner of our lives escaping exposure to others, and God wants us, for the benefit of our growth in holiness and the pure testimony of His church, to be constantly aware of this.
It is this assistance in the 'guarding' of our hearts, that the body of Christ is meant to be. While this type of situation can be abused for the purposes of manipulation or engendering pride with no regard to the higher context of shame before God, it doesn't mean we should not be aware of God's purposes for it in the context of the Body. We are still living in the tension of the two natures, still in the process of sanctification, and still on this earth. It seems God wants to use and even redeem in some way our fallen desire to live for the honour of others and to avoid shame before others, detached from our place before God, to bring us to a realisation of sin's effect on a human to human relationship level so that we might 'wake up' to sin's effect on the human to God relationship level.
As I read RC Sproul Jr's article, I couldn't help but clearly see what he was trying to say. 'Privacy' and going incognito is an issue we can easily take way out of balance especially in the context of the local church and the community of Christ's Body of which we are a part. The larger the church the more chance of even compartmentalising our church life so that maybe the people we serve alongside if say we help out in the Sunday School are people we don't interact with in any other area of church life (where we sit in the service or who is in our home bible study group).
Mega Churches that easily facilitate this are maybe not helping our spiritual health as individuals nor the spiritual health of the church. Nor are smaller churches that have a wrong view of 'privacy' of the individual so that a person is excluded from helpful godly relationship within the Body of Christ. In fact it is reducing, and maybe even eliminating in some instances, part of the role of the local church in our lives - that of helping us to resist temptation by being a tight family of accountability which helps us to be constantly aware that we can't 'hide' our sin. Getting into the habit of hiding our sin will be to the detriment of our relationship with Christ including the loss of the true joy, blessing and depth of that relationship both on a personal and corporate level.
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