Live in Him
John 17:20-26
The divine strategy to save our world is simple: Unity. To make all Christians share one life in one great family and thereby make a world which has been starving for meaningful personal relationships, simply drool with desire. That’s God’s strategy.
But unity is hard to see. What makes the unity of believers visible is the love we show for one another. Jesus is very specific about it, saying: “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:26) That’s the secret. And that’s why the church has failed to reach the world in our day. We haven’t loved one another. “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35) So, is it any surprise that the world doesn’t trust us?
More than that, John says, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. (1 John 5:2) It all begins here.
Now this love isn’t just sticky sentimentality. Sentiment has been described as “that warm feeling about the heart that you can’t scratch.” This isn’t that. And it’s also not some smokescreen used to hide a dagger of dislike. Romans 12:9 tells us: “Let love be genuine.”
Genuine love needs contact. It’s ridiculous to talk about loving another Christian if you won’t speak to them. There must be contact with the willingness to talk. There’s no room for aloofness. We can’t withdraw from each other.
Genuine love involves mutual concern. And that doesn’t mean just making some superficial greeting in passing, but a willingness to listen to what people really have to say. A willingness to listen to the answer when you ask someone, “How are you?”
Every contact needs to be marked by a readiness to help, to share, to listen, to pray. It needs a willingness to bear one another’s burdens in the Lord and fulfill the law of Christ by doing it. All true Christian love is marked by a mutual sense of contribution and that means recognizing that we need each other.
This kind of love isn’t something we work our way into. It’s a gift that’s in us by virtue of the fact that Jesus Christ is in us. But it does require our consent. The Lord is ready to love through us anytime we’re ready to let ourselves be the channel of that love.
So, are we willing to do that? Are we ready to say, Lord, teach me to give up my prejudices, separations, withdrawal, and these less than Christian attitudes toward our brothers and sisters in Christ? Are we willing to love them and to show it, for Christ’s sake?
We will be if we’ll only just live in Him.