Who should a Christian be? What should a Christian do? We often wrestle over these questions, but the answer should be pretty clear because Jesus was once asked about the greatest commandment. His answer:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
But, Jesus wasn’t finished. He was asked about the greatest commandment, and he gave it, but he followed up with commandment number two,
You shall love your neighbor as yourself
There it is. What is a Christian to be? A lover of God and a lover of others. In our current cultural moment we tend to focus on what divides us instead of what unites us, but I wonder what it might look like if Christians were to commit to loving the Lord with our whole heart and with loving our neighbor as ourself? It would be interesting.
What if, instead of bickering, we focused our efforts on loving the Lord well and showing our love of the Lord to our neighbors through hospitality, evangelism, and acts of service? What if, instead of trying to “out” the next social justice warrior, we showed our love of the Lord by pursuing racial reconciliation and worked to see real change in the way our culture cares for drug addicts? What if we loved Jesus enough to worry less about a person’s stance on the environment than on their relationship with the living God? What if we focused more on Jesus and less on social media icons? What if we got our talking points from God’s word and not a political party?
What if we rejected the polarization in our world and instead pursued the unity that is found in the spirit of Christ.
Will it be easy to repair broken relationships and to love others well? No. Not everyone is equally lovable. Some people are hard to love, and sometimes you and I can be hard to love as well. But, Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors.
We live in a culture that is unhappy and seems bent on becoming more unhappy. Cable news is fueled by outrage and argument, and the same concept has crept into the Christian culture. Instead of loving our brothers and sisters, we work to “out” our brothers and sisters for not loving God enough or for not loving our neighbors right.
Perhaps, if we commit to loving the Lord and loving our neighbor, we might be able to see a difference in our world. Will a commitment to love bring about revival? I don’t know. Will a commitment to love change the whole world? I don’t know. But, I do know that loving the Lord and loving our neighbor is the right thing for Christians to do. Further, I have a suspicion that even if we can’t change everything, we might be able to change something or someone. And, really, isn’t that enough?
Very good!