Who's your Nathan?

Our community group is currently reading Everbody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them. While I don't particularly care for the book, there have been a few chapters worth reading, especially the one we discussed last night -- The Gift Nobody Wants: Confrontation.

The chapter focuses on the story of David and Bathsheba. David seduces Bathsheba, wife of Uriah. David learns she's pregnant and summons Uriah from war with the hope Uriah will sleep with his wife and think the baby is his. Uriah returns, but doesn't sleep with her. David orders Uriah's death and marries now widowed Bathsheba. God sends Nathan, a prophet, to confront David and hold him accountable. David ultimately confesses his sin.

Now before David even slept with Bathsheba, he was questioned by his servant who appears to have had the foresight to know David was headed in the wrong direction. "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" In other words, "This is somebody's wife. Somebody's daughter. Be careful."

"If David were in a spiritually sensitive place with God, [those] statements would have stopped him in his tracks."

I'm a BIG advocate of having a Nathan in our lives. "Without a Nathan...we have a way of drifting off course." But what I've learned from this chapter is, no matter how many Nathan's we have in our life, it's not going to make a world of difference if we're not "at a spiritually sensitive place with God."

Who's your Nathan?

"Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the sever reprimand which calls another Christian in one's community back from the path of sin." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer