OVERCOMING FAMILIARITY

 

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. Familiarity means knowing someone so well. Contempt means lack of respect for a person or a thing. Therefore, the general meaning is that when you know someone so well, you will begin to disrespect and despise him. The person who once was a blessing to you and you longed to meet and listen to; as time have went on, the longing dies away and you begin to take lightly what you took so seriously in the beginning. 

We become familiar with a person mostly because we see him/her often. As times goes by, we begin to realize that they also have weaknesses which we had not noticed at the beginning when we didn’t know them well and we now despise them for these apparent weaknesses. 

We become familiar with family members, friends and colleagues, and with servants of God unfortunately, and we also become familiar with God to our own destruction. This leads us to not experience the blessings we once enjoyed from the said persons.

Since we must live with people and we somehow will discover their weakness and we cannot run away from that, we need to know what we ought to do in order not to become familiar with them, especially those in spiritual authority; i.e. pastors, elders and other leaders in the church because when we become familiar with them, we will never receive what God wanted us to have through their lives and ministries.

We can learn from some letters in the new testament where the weaknesses of the churches are exposed.

THE CORINTHIAN CHURCH

Paul exposes the sins of the Corinthian church in chapter 1:10 onwards, envy, strife, divisions, sexual immorarity… and other things mentioned, but before that, there is chapter 1:1-9. And what he does first of all is that he appreciates them, their enrichment in every way, in speech and knowledge, having all the gifts of the Spirit and blessing them saying that God will keep them strong and blameless until Christ comes.

EPHESUS CHURCH

We read in Revelation God rebuking the Ephesian Christians for leaving their first love but before that He lists their good qualities. Their deeds, toils, perseverance, not tolerate evil men, testing false teachers, and suffering for Christ without growing weary. Rev 2:1-5

THYTIRA CHURCH

He rebukes them for allowing jezebel to leads Gods servants astray to sexual immorality, but before that He says that He know their deeds, love, faith, service and endurance and their constant improvement on all things. Rev 5:18-20

From the three churches we learn that we need to look for good in the people first of all. We need to find something we can appreciate constantly give thanks for, to them and to God. Paul and John had spiritual authority over these churches and that is why they rebuked and corrected them; and since we may not have such authority, whenever we see the weaknesses of people, we should not gossip to others but we should take that as a call from God to pray for them.

To overcome familiarity, we must learn to find the good qualities we see and unlearn to look for the faults and weakness in people. Learn to appreciate and unlearn to criticize, judge or condemn others. Learn to intercede and unlearn to gossip, backbite and slander others.

To not be familiar with God, learn as the hymn says, to count your blessing and name them one by one. Every time you think you have something to complain about; that’s the best time to first of all, count your blessings name them one by one and to see all the good God has done for.

Giving thanks to men and to God is the secret of overcoming familiarity.

You are blessed to be a blessing

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