When I was in high school, nearly every year I would ask a friend to be my accountability partner. We’d always start out strong. The difficulty was, while we were committed to help each other, we didn’t really know how. We’d end up confessing and then commiserating over how hard it is to fight sin. Then our meetings would trail off. No surprise. Who wants to sit around feeling defeated?
Accountability partners or accountability groups or small groups or community groups or life groups or whatever you’d like to call them (I’m trying to address all those kinds of relationships) are valuable gifts from the Lord. Whether those relationships are formally assigned church groups or organically initiated intentional friendships, they can provide great opportunities for deeper fellowship and more targeted discipleship. But the usefulness of such relationships or groups depends on whether or not you allow the Bible’s instruction about people to inform how you think about such groups. Here are six brief applications of a scriptural doctrine of man—two on human nature, and four on sin.
1. People are limited.
While it may feel painfully obvious, we regularly forget that we are not God. God is all-powerful. We are not. God
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