Tuesday, August 5, 2014

A New Kind of Love

“1Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” Eph. 5:1-2 NKJV
Love seems to be the topic of the day, and a taboo one at that in certain climates. The love in reference here for the purposes of this article will be that of Christian love for others. Having experienced many opportunities this summer, with many students, adults and children, there have been many responses to the love shown by our groups and the groups we have been serving alongside this summer. Literally from one end of the spectrum to the other we have seen huge shifts in the way people receive the loving acts done through our summer missions programs this year. 
Some Christian groups are concerned with being too loving and not strong enough doctrinally/theologically. Prolific Pastor Andy Stanley refers to these two extremes as “Deep and Wide.” Some churches can be extremely deep theologically and very shallow in their showing of the things they know of/about God. Others can be very loving in their expression of God (wide) but not very deep biblically. I believe in light of our study of 1 Cor. 13 this last Sunday as well as the scripture at the beginning of this writing, God’s desire is for us to be both! 
God desires us to imitate Him, following the example He set. We are to be just like a small child who is like a shadow to his father, tracing every footstep, imitating every word, action, or move. We are to be like that child that yearns to be just like his dad. We are to be just like Jesus, who came down to this Earth, teaching deep theological truths that were equally balanced with a showing of what those truths looked like when lived out. You see, love is an action. God tells us to “walk in love” not sit in love, or look in love but to actually do something with the love of God. Jesus’ love provoked Him to action and even ultimately to the greatest action of love the world has ever experienced, death on a cross. 
God desires to speak the truth in love. He desires that His truth be delivered with a healthy dose of action as well. I think John C. Maxwell summed the perfect balance of love lived out and Biblical truth when he said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” God desires that we be both deep and wide, that we walk in love and imitate His example.

What does that look like here at our church? Maybe it means we do something we have never done before, or maybe it means we do something even better than ever before. Let us help kindle the fire that has returned from each of these summer mission trips. Let us learn from the acts of sacrificial service to communities they didn’t even know, and bring these acts of sacrificial service here to our homes, our cities, our communities and our families. Let it be said of our church, like Jason and others in Acts 17, that we turned the world upside down with the truth. My friend Joey Cook says it best this way, “This generation doesn’t need a new definition of Christianity, but a new demonstration of the Church.”