Gospel-Driven Accountability

REAL INTIMACY:
AN ALTERNATIVE TO ACCOUNTABILITY


Accountability is often based on questions that touch only on external behaviors. For example: Have you looked at pornography? Have you masturbated? Have you thought about doing either? And, have you lied about the previous questions? If relationships are going to help bring maturity, we must enter a process that goes beyond externals and simply measuring up to a standard. Such questions fail to penetrate the internal functioning of the deceitful heart. To care deeply by asking tough questions gives the opportunity of establishing real intimacy. The questions are not a check-up, but a process for growth and intimacy. Real intimacy is learning to love well. Loving well is not manipulation for positive answers, it is a process of maturing. You should be pursuing feedback from others to begin to discover the arrogance and deceit of your own heart (Mk. 7:20-23.) The process is more for the purpose of developing humility and godliness than demonstrating or achieving successful relationship.

The Right Questions: 1

How would your friends, relatives, and/or spouse answer the following? If the answers are consistently positive, then either your friends, relatives, or spouse have been dishonest, you are deceiving them, or you have been glorified.

1. Am I open to honestly acknowledging sin in my relationships with you/family/friends?

2. Do I regularly ask for your feedback regarding my relational weaknesses and deceitfulness?

3. Do you see me openly and honestly facing my personal struggles?

4. Do you see me pursuing God as a man/woman who is hungry and starving?

5. Am I too focused on the externals of godliness and not on a commitment to love God and others?

Continue To Ask Yourself:

1. Who am I? Describe difficult events and circumstances that have impacted your relationship with God and others. What emotions, thoughts, and desires are you left with as a result of events in your life?
2. Where am I? How do these events affect your relating to others? What relational patterns have developed as a result of these events?

3. Who am I in my marriage, family, or among friends? If I invite honesty, what am I like to live with?

4. Are you a person of integrity? What questions do you want others to ask you? What questions would God ask you?

5. What things do I take more seriously than God?

6. Am I responding out of worry or fear to my circumstances or out of a deep growing faith in God?

7. Can I honestly say to my spouse or best friend that I hope only in God? Would they believe me?

Suggestions:

1. When you pray, work at seeing the bigger issues of redemption and not your own circumstances.

2. Think about the price Christ paid for you to have access to God?

3. When you pray, be aware of your motives—to get God to do things your way or to get you to do things His way.


Ó 1997 by Dr. Harry W. Schaumberg. For information on STONE GATE Resources and Brief Intensive Counseling call toll-free: (888) 575-3030. Email: stonegater@cs.com. Web Site: www.stonegatersources.com. This information may be copied without further permission if done so in it’s entirety and included this copyright information.


1




Dan Allender, “Humility; Antidote to Shame,” Perspective, vol. 2, no. 1 (1987,) page 42.