Have you ever been reading the Bible and stumbled over something that turned on a light? That happened to me during a quiet time recently. What I read was:
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:9-11).
What caught my eye was right at the beginning: “that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.” Love leads to knowledge. And then knowledge, along with discernment, leads to righteousness. Love comes first in this sequence. If I take this seriously, the reason why the greatest commandments are the greatest is not just that love is the most important virtue, but also because love is the road that leads to all the others.
The way I come to know Christ – not just to know about him but to know him – is to love like he does. How have we missed this? From the very beginning the church has known God’s command to love one another. We’ve all been taught that the two greatest commandments are to love. Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, every denomination and every local church affirms that we have a duty before God to love him and to love each other. But we don’t do it! For thousands of years we’ve known these commandments, but we have not obeyed them. To be fair, many have. In every generation there have been believers who actually love God and love their neighbors. But the church as a whole has not. No wonder we’re divided into so many different denominations!
Theological differences are not what broke the church apart. That’s the key insight here. Differences in doctrine and practice are not the cause of division, but rather a symptom of it. We don’t agree with each other on important theological issues because our “knowledge and depth of insight” and our ability “to discern what is best” have been damaged. Because we don’t love each other. We have bought the lie that differences in the way we interpret God’s word trump his command to love one another. And by so doing, we have cut ourselves off from God’s insight to be able to resolve those different interpretations. We have forgotten that:
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen (1 John 4:20).
And this affects those outside the church as well. The most important way we reveal Jesus to the world is not evangelism, or caring for the homeless, or advocating for just laws, although all of those are necessary and good. The most important way we reveal Jesus to the world is by loving our brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus himself said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35). He didn’t say it was by loving those outside the church, although that’s commanded too in other Scriptures, but by loving one another. Including all those brothers and sisters who, for one reason or another, are hard to love. No, not just including them, especially them.
This, then, is our charge. And by “our” I don’t mean church leaders or Christian celebrities (although they are included). I mean you, the one reading this. And I mean me. God wants us to love our brothers and our sisters. All of them. All the time. After two thousand years of church history, let’s you and me start doing that.