United in the Love of Godنموونە

Love in Unity

Unity in the church is supposed to go beyond the mere level of people showing up at the same place once a week and then leaving, not interacting with one another until next week. Unity within the church is shown by a community of people made up of every tribe, language, and nation. This is what the church fundamentally is: one cross-cultural, cross-social, cross-ethnic, cross-generational united community.

But for this to happen, we need to cultivate the kind of relationships within the church that are strong enough to unite us together across tribes, languages, and nations; relationships that are magnetic and attractive enough to overcome our personal preferences and biases; relationships that are stable enough to hold us together even when navigating through the inevitable conflicts and tensions that crop up when differing peoples are brought together in close relationship.

The one thing that does this, that gives us this posture and inclination, that provides this kind of solidifying and stabilizing relationship, is love. For there to be the most robust unity, the most cross-cultural unity, people must actively and generously love one another.

We must love each other in a way that overcomes our differences. We must love each other in contrast to our tendencies to judge and separate from one another.

Paul writes in Romans 8, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? . . .”

To be a Christian is to be brought so close to God that you can never fall away from Him and His love. Nothing can come between you and God’s love. Why is this? It’s because to be a Christian is to be in Christ Jesus and be in the love of God. Paul describes us as being “in Christ Jesus our Lord,” which means we are right in the center of God’s love. We are forever rooted and secure in His love. We are always surrounded by a vast ocean of love. And nothing can take us out of it.

And it’s because we all are now in Jesus, and in His love, that we then see how to love one another. We love one another in and from and with the same love in which we are rooted and secured, the same love that surrounds us and that is actually in us.

God is love; in and within Him is love. We, by faith in Jesus, are brought right into this love, to experience it and share in it.