Love is the greatest sign and characteristic of Christians according to Christ, their namesake. Yet looking around at some public displays of Christianity lately, you simply have to ask the question, along with the Black Eyed Peas so long ago: “Where is the Love?”
Much of society views Christians as unloving, irrelevant, impractical, arrogant, and narrow. Can you blame them? “Christ” has been co-opted to advance political agendas, bully the outsider, judge the ‘other’, and justify positions, statements and protests on just about anything. Tragically many also use Christ as a means to power-up over others and exert superiority over them, including toward their fellow Christians. There’s a warped theology-of-sorts behind that which I won’t get into here, but it exists and it shows.
Some Christians have lost the plot.
So many Scriptures, like 1 Corinthians 13, repudiate the arrogant and unloving posture of Christians. Without love, we are like noisy gongs and clanging symbols – noticed, but unpleasant and without a harmony of meaning. Christ often speaks to the fact that it is not grand displays of our version of spirituality and moral values that draw people to the love of God (see Matthew 6:5). Instead it’s the quiet, localized and faithful expressions of love that makes the difference.
Don’t think that God needs you to ‘defend the faith’. Don’t believe the rhetoric that you have to go public or viral with your faith in order to ‘make’ society or individuals conform to Christian principles. Christ doesn’t give you a bully pulpit. He needs none of that. He’s chosen, as Robert Louis Stevenson expresses in The Call of the Wild, “the simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things” to eventually change lives. The small things, like being yeast, seed, salt and light eventually change the environment in which they are scattered.
 |
| Eugene Petersen |
Put down your placards. Silence your horns. Stop separating yourself from ‘them’. The thing we are to do is to come alongside others and love - unequivocally. That’s how the world will know we are Christians. But it’s not even our ‘reputation’ as Christians that is the important thing here. Since love is the very character of God, it is through demonstrating that love that the world is changed into the design God had for it from the beginning.
It’s not about your design for what this world should be. It’s about God’s. You won’t see that happen without doing it His way – the way of love.
The Gospel Story has one plot - the Love of God. Don't lose it.
