Life in the Family of God

Last week I spoke at the 2024 Mothers Union Sydney conference: Stronger Together in the Family of God. I was asked to address the topic of Being Church: Life in the Family of God. Below is an excerpt from that talk.

Being Church: Life in the Family of God

… Let me be very clear. Marriage is a wonderful gift from God. It has enormous significance, enormous meaning, and enormous importance. Marriage is very, very good, and it is able to bear very, very good fruit. Most wonderfully, our marriages are meant to point us towards the eternal marriage between Christ and the Church. Marriage is so important. 

But marriage is not how we belong to the church. Marriage is not how we feel connected to others in the church. Marriage is not the way we enter into relationships in the church.

The Bible honours marriage, and it calls us to honour marriage. But when it comes to life in the family of God, do you know what male/female relationship it talks about over and over again? Do you know what male/female relationship Scripture puts at the very heart of life in the family of God?

It isn’t husband and wife.
It is brother and sister in Christ.

The Bible reveals that our life together in the family of God is fundamentally the life of sons and daughters of God and, therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ.

Even just something as simple as a search on the word “brother” in the New Testament brings that truth rushing home to us.  Here’s a list of all the New Testament books with the number of times the word “brother” is used in each.  For the sake of the exercise, I’ve left the gospels out of this list because they quite often use the word brother to speak about actual biological brotherhood rather than spiritual brotherhood.  

• Acts (31)

• Romans (17)

• 1 Corinthians (32)

• 2 Corinthians (12)

• Galatians (11)

• Ephesians (2)

• Philippians (9)

• Colossians (5)

• 1 Thessalonians (17)

• 2 Thessalonians (7)

• 1 Timothy (2)

• 2 Timothy (1)

• Philemon (4)

• Hebrews (8)

• James (15)

• 1 Peter (1)

• 2 Peter (2)

• 1 John (12)

• 3 John (1)

• Jude (1)

• Revelation (4)

In those books, the word “brother” is used 194 times.

The overwhelming majority of the instances refer to spiritual, rather than biological, brotherhood. In each of those references, the word “sister” is either used alongside “brother”, or it is theologically implied as part of the spiritual sibling relationship on view.

194 times.

But to get a greater sense of what the New Testament actually means when it speaks about brothers and sisters in the family of the Church,  let’s zoom in on just one of those books in the Bible—the book of Acts. In this book, we get a remarkable insight into the life of the early church in their baby years, right as they were getting started. As the family of God was being formed, how were they speaking about their relationships with each other within that family?

Well, let’s look at the very first time the Apostle Peter addressed the church after Jesus had ascended. In fact, let’s look at the very first words he used as he did that.

In those days, Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty)  and said, “Brothers and sisters…”. (Acts 1:15-16)

Right there, in the very first chapter of Acts, when the total number of Christians in the world was a small portion of the number of people reading this particular post, Peter was already addressing them as his and each other’s brothers and sisters.

Or consider what happened when the apostles gathered all the Christians in Jerusalem together so that the church might appoint a number of its members to oversee the practical needs of the church. We are told the apostles said:

Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom...  (Acts 6:3)

Right from the very start, the gathered church, the family of God, the men and women who made up his household were each other’s brothers and sisters.

And so it is no surprise that as we trace through Paul’s missionary journeys in later chapters of Acts, over and over again, we read about how he visited with “brothers and sisters” all over the place. Most of these men and women were people he had never met before. And yet he speaks about meeting, being welcomed by, staying with the “brothers and sisters” in Judea (Acts 11:29), in Phillipi (Acts 16:40), in Corinth (Acts 18:18), in Ptolemais [Phoenica] (Acts 21:7), in Jerusalem (Acts 21:17), in Puteoli [Naples] (Acts 28:13), in Rome (Acts 28:15) and elsewhere.

Right from the very beginning, life between members of this new, burgeoning, forming family of God was the life of brothers and sisters.

Now, that is not exactly news to us, is it? We’re used to the New Testament authors using the language of siblings and, in fact, using it frequently. But I fear that the language of “brother and sisters” is so familiar to us that it has become overly familiar to us. To put it another way, I fear we are so used to seeing that phrase in Scripture that we almost don’t see it anymore.

We’ve domesticated being brothers and sisters in Christ into a nice, warm-fuzzy sentiment and little more than that. And perhaps that’s not particularly surprising given the place siblings occupy in our context today. Siblings are often nice to have. By and large, we appreciate having brothers or sisters. Most of us love them most of the time (even if that may be harder for some than others!).

Brothers and sisters are not unimportant to us today. But they are not the essential relationship within the modern family. They are not the glue that holds the household together. They are not the male/female relationship at the centre of the family. For us, that honour belongs to marriage.

But that wasn’t the case at the time of Jesus, at the time of the early church, at the time the New Testament was being written.  At that time, in that place, the relationship between husband and wife was important, sure. But it was the relationship between brothers and sisters that was the fundamental, the foundational, the formative relationship that lay at the heart of the family.

Here is how Joseph Hellerman puts it in his book When the Church Was a Family:

Among those who belong to the same generation in the world of Mediterranean antiquity, the closest family tie was not the contractual relationship between husband and wife. It was the blood relationship between siblings. As is now generally recognised by students of ancient family systems, the strongest ties of loyalty and affection in the New Testament world were ideally those shared among a group of brothers and sisters. The emotional bonding modern Westerners expect as a mark of a healthy husband-wife relationship was normally characteristic of sibling relationships. (p. 37-38)

Can you think of a passage in the gospels that gives us a glimpse into the deep 1st Century intimacy between siblings? Well, there are a bunch of them, but let me pick just one. For me, its perhaps the most moving of them all. Here is a short excerpt from it:

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.)  So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”
…
On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. (John 11:1-3, 17-19)

We know there is a good news story here. Jesus brings Lazarus back from the dead! But have you ever stopped to wonder about the emphasis on siblinghood in this passage?

When Lazarus is sick, it is not a wife, children or parents who send word to Jesus. It is his sisters.

When Lazarus dies, it is not a wife, children, or parents who many Jews travel from Jerusalem to comfort. It is his sisters.

When Jesus arrives, it is not a wife, children or parents who rush out to meet him and fall at his feet. It is a sister.

When Jesus is moved to tears over Lazarus’ death, it is not the grief of a wife or children or parents that prompts that. It is the grief of his sister.

For 1^st Century readers, it would have made complete sense why this story was about a man and his two sisters. For Mary, Martha and Lazarus, their most intimate family relationships were with each other as brothers and sisters.

For us 21^st Century western readers, the whole idea grates. Yet our role is not to judge what people in the 1^st Century thought about the family. Instead, it is to understand what they thought about the family.  Because if we do that, we can better understand why the New Testament speaks about family in the way it does, and what implications that has for our life together in the family of God today…