The apostle does not tire of reminding us that for a Christian the matter is never about one's own successes, achievements, or, conversely, failures. Of course, Christian life is...
The apostle does not tire of reminding us that for a Christian the matter is never about one's own successes, achievements, or, conversely, failures. Of course, Christian life is a spiritual path that must be walked. But the main thing on this path is not self-improvement, but the manifestation of the Kingdom to the world. A Christian lives not for himself, but for others. True, not in the sense of the altruism that people around us for some reason often expect from Christians, but in the sense of one's participation in the Kingdom.
The ministry of a Christian is his very life, provided that it is truly Christian, because in that case the life of the Kingdom shows through it, further and further, ever more brightly and clearly, and everyone who communicates with him can partake of it. But such a life is possible only if from the very beginning a person renounces the thought of living by himself. Not for himself or for others, but by himself.
The life of a Christian ceases to belong to him; it becomes God's, Christ's, flowing into the stream of the life of the Kingdom, which surpasses everything a person could imagine. But the stream of this life must flow freely. It is impossible to keep it for oneself, to stop it, to separate out a few streams from it so that they are guaranteed to belong to some particular person. Here it is either free movement or nothing. But then one has to renounce the absolutizing of any forms, ways, and images of Christian life, including one's own. One has to realize that the life of all Christians, if they are truly Christians, is one, while the forms - organizational, liturgical, religious in general - are secondary. And none of them is better than any other; each is good when it is appropriate, when it is adequate to existence in the Kingdom for certain people or communities. And if so, then the refusal to absolutize one's own form becomes not simply a concession to the neighbor, but a necessary condition for abiding in the Kingdom.
Indeed, even those forms, including religious ones, which we consider our own, native, and organic, are relative in their essence, and at some point we will very likely have to give them up. Then an observant Jew can discover that what he was so proud of and held on to so tightly - his own religiosity - gives him no advantages at all in the main thing over a Gentile who had nothing of the kind. That is why the apostle advises not to absolutize any forms: for absolutizing presupposes self-identification, which in spiritual life will hinder rather than help.
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15:3 But bore not only the infirmities, but reproaches, of his brethren; and so fulfilled that scripture. Psa 69:9
15:4 Aforetime - In the Old Testament. That we through patience and consolation of the scriptures may have hope - That through the consolation which God gives us by these, we may have patience and a joyful hope.