THURSDAY
This abundant life that we have discovered in Christ must be lived together. This is the church. Every Christian is called to participate in community with one another. Just as God exists in a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—so we exist in community. How else are we to practice Jesus’ commandment to love one another?
The last few years I have been captivated by Jesus’ farewell discourse with his disciples. You’ve likely noticed, as I reference it often in this devotional. In the farewell discourse Jesus says this to his disciples:
John 13:34–35 34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
When we look at the infighting, disunity and pettiness in the church, it seems clear to me that we are not doing very well at living out this command from Jesus. In large part I think it’s because we have tried to love in our power and abilities instead of abiding in Christ and looking for the Spirit to produce this in us. We have also outsourced our evangelism and discipleship strategies away from Jesus and the Spirit of God to leadership material and conventional wisdom. We have detached from the vine and the core has begun to rot. On the outside the churches still look vibrant, energetic, flashy and attractive, but inside there is little love, at least the love that comes from God and is defined by God.
Reattaching to the vine, surrendering to the Spirit of God, and learning to love one another again is essential to restoring the core of the church. Loving one another like Jesus has loved us is our best evangelism strategy. It’s not necessarily our attractive programming, worship services or eloquent presentations of the gospel. Those are fine but they are not the core of our mission from Jesus . They mean little if we aren’t living in the love of Christ as the first fruit of the abundant life. Loving one another with this divine love makes the way of Jesus look glorious.
Our culture’s redefinition of love is a sinister, crafty attack from the Enemy. Love is defined not by God, but in the framework of tolerance. The generally accepted definition of love is entangled in our post-modern ideas of relative truth and morality. “If you love me you will accept everything I say and do.” Of course this is false, but large swaths of the culture have adopted this definition and so coopted the idea of love. Therefore, there is little fruit in arguing this fallacy. Now, those who draw no moral lines and make no truth claims to which everyone is beholden, are the most loving ones. The Christian concept of love has been flanked from the culture’s perspective.
For many of the “nones” (those who claim to be spiritual but have no specific religious affiliation) this has become a non-starter with the church. Why would they attend a church when they are experiencing more love (as they define it) in their secular environments than in the church? So they never darken the doorstep of a church.
I am confident that this concept of love will run it’s course and prove to be vacuous in the eyes of the larger culture. I don’t have much evidence to back that up…just hope. When it does, my prayer is that the church will have the experience, the equity, the fortitude to say, “Here’s what love is. Let me show you Jesus’ way of love.” We can only do that if we genuinely love one another and live it out.
Living out love means many things: sacrificing for one another, giving without expecting anything in return, showing hospitality to one another, remaining united in the midst of disagreements, interceding for one another, pronouncing blessing over one another, being patient with one another, speaking truth to one another, boasting only in God, etc. The New Testament is full of these types of imperatives because this type of love is so vitally important to our mission.
This kind of love is a fruit of the Spirit and only comes from abiding in Christ. Again, we desperately need God to produce this in us. This is how the world will know we are Jesus’ disciples—not by how much we know about the Bible, not by our put-together lives, not by big churches and flashy programs. Nope! It is by how we love one another with the love that is defined, sourced and given by God.
Reflection
As the integral part to living the abundant life of Christ together, commit afresh to loving one another as Christ has loved us.