Pilgrim Soldier

The longer I’m walking this path of discipleship the more convinced I am becoming that one of the biggest reasons that more and more people are disillusioned by the Church (and also why less and less people see the Christian ‘religion’ as a viable option in their lives) is because of the sheer lack of love shown between Christians. This is coupled to the language of hate that seems to be to stock language of many Christians towards those who they deem to be the worst ’sinners’.

Strangely as I read the New Testament the message that comes across time and time and time again is the message of ‘Love’! God’s love towards sinful humanity and sinful humanity’s flawed attempt to love him back. What I don’t understand is where nastiness and hatred fit into the picture!

What causes this question today? Well as one friend lies in hospital seriously ill, someone who I have never ever seen show anything but love towards God and her fellow humanity, I’ve seen others, on the very public forum of Facebook, who find it humorous to make nasty jokes or downright nasty (dare I say evil?) comments about someone they’ve never met and who is unable to defend himself due to his untimely death and at the same time proclaim their love for God. I seem to recall the Bible talks about that somewhere!

So where is the love in our walk? I’m not always good at it, but dear Lord help me get better!

I was reminded this week of something that a great writer once said: “Three things will last forever; faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” If he’s right, I sometimes wonder if those with seemingly little faith, but out loving and serving people, might have a leg up on those who spent so much time hanging out in the church building “serving the Lord”. If love is greater than faith, quite a few of us may need to change our weekly planners up a bit.

Over on another blog (forgot to make note of where) I saw the above comment and it made me sit up and think hard, especially in the light of the conversation that I shared in my last post.

Love for God and for others were the two most important commands that Jesus gave; love is first within the list of the fruit of the Spirit; and Paul tells us that love is greater than faith and hope. We need to make sure that love is central to our walk as disciples of Jesus and there is no place in our lives for anything that detracts from that love.

This is the power of the Cross, that the man who contained the fullness of God himself died to free us from the burden of sin. He paid the price that we rightfully should pay, because He not only loves us, but is love. The result is that when we come before God we can stand before him in the sure and certain knowledge that because of the cross our sin have been redeemed!

So for the last 30 years the Indian spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi has been giving out free hugs, allegedly 26 million of them to date, and leaves people feeling wonderful and loved.¹ She’s not a Christian but I suspect she may have stumbled upon something that people are craving, love!

Why aren’t we as unconditional in our expressions of love? So when was the last time you hugged someone?

Zoe has been doing some tidying this afternoon in preparation for the eventual packing that we need to do. In doing so she came across a piece of paper where I had made some notes quite awhile ago now.

Several months ago now we had an interesting meeting at Riga 1. It was completely different from the normal and involved us breaking up into small groups to talk about some of the things that Sarah had just been teaching about. I found myself in a group made up of my good friend Steve, two Latvian speakers and one older Russian speaking lady. Because of the all the translation we didn’t get very far down the list of questions, but we didn’t really need to.

The first discussion point was to do people who seem to believe that what is going to happen is “written in the stars”. It didn’t take much for us to all agree that this was not the case and that to some extent we all have the opportunity to influence our own lives for the good. This even goes for those who are disadvantaged in some way, even though it might be difficult. It was then that the old Russian lady came out with a gem of a comment:

When you’re down on your knees you have to stand up. Our job is to encourage and support people to stand!”

What a wonderful concept that is! People who have been brought to their knees due to difficult circumstances are not necessarily ready to stand on their own. If we force them to stand by dragging them to their feet they are likely to collapse again as soon as we let go. Isn’t it better for us to be beside them on their knees and gently encourage them to stand and be ready to catch them if they start to fall again? Isn’t that what showing love to others should be like?