Last week I was reminded again that my focus is not always on the things that really matter.This seems to be a common problem for Christ-followers (and for humans in general). Those of us who claim to follow Christ ought to be able to get our priorities right. After all God has laid them out for us very clearly:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40 ESV)

But far too often we don’t. We miss the mark on both of these, but lately I’ve been most reminded of my failures in the second area. Yet loving people, actually just loving fellow Christians, is supposed to make our Christianity obvious to the world. Jesus made this very clear in his last extended conversation with his disciples before the cross: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35 ESV) A little later that same evening he prays in front of them: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17:22-23 ESV)

This shouldn’t be news to any of us, and most of us at least pay lip service to loving other Christians, especially the ones in our own denomination or local church body. But how many of us love them the way Christ is talking about? Can that old song “We Are One in the Spirit” actually be applied to us? To me?

I’m grateful to say that I’ve been in situations where I have truly experienced that kind of love, especially in smaller groups. I always think of one particular Sunday School class that was way too large to work well in human terms (30+people), but was an extremely close-knit group of people dedicated to the Lord, growing in faith, and loving each other. I’ve seldom grown so much or felt so supported as the years with that group.

Of course, God’s intention for us is that we have this kind of experience all of the time as we associate with fellow Christians. And we often don’t. 

I’ve been coming to some realizations of late about my own shortcomings in this area. Maybe they will resonate with some of you:

I have come to realize that I need to work on finding a better way to love the poor in the community of Christ than giving a twenty dollar bill to the benevolence fund every fifth Sunday. 

I do not understand why God included the color orange in his palette. It looks terrible on me in every shade, and I just don’t like to look at it. It is also the the logo color at my church and the color of the t-shirt worn by all of the greeters and ushers and other volunteers with similar roles. I have had to get over that and specifically over the resentment toward the people who picked out the color scheme. That’s a silly cause for disunity, but how often have churches been hurt by a fight over the color of the carpet or the seats? 

There are a few members of my church with whom I really just don’t seem to have anything in common, and sometimes I just don’t like them much. But I’m coming to recognize that I need to love them anyway. After all, I do have at least one thing in common with any person who loves God, and our differences may be just the source of an ability to support one another. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago when working in Vacation Bible School. 

I was the leader for the 6th grade class. I had a fellow teacher for the class with whom I had very little in common. I was working on my PhD in computer science, and I was focused on the intellectual, the academic, and the scientific. She was a stay-at-home mom with much less formal education. I respected the choice to stay home with one’s children, but I just struggled to connect with her. Yet here we were working together. Now, I love to teach, and doing the Bible study was great, but we were also expected to do crafts. Given that we were doing sixth grade, I could get around that a little bit. We typically had an option where the kids were creating a newspaper or a video, and I could supervise that. However, we also needed to provide some actual crafts, where they made things. Creative, physical things. This was not my forte. My fellow teacher, the one I struggled to work with at first because of our lack of compatibility, was great with crafts. Very capable, super creative, everything I am not when it comes to making physical and/or artistic things. 

This is the point Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 12 as he talks about the value of different gifts and the need of all members of the body of Christ.

I think there are many things that we allow to take over the priority that God and people are supposed to have: colors, music styles, music volume, personal interests, money. God has made it clear that these things must take a back seat to loving him and loving people. I’m going to try to do better this week. How about you?

 

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash