Rescue: Fighting Fire by Justin CampSampel

Do you ever think, All the religion I need is church on Sundays. Okay, maybe I’ll drop into a men’s group every once in a while or go to the men’s retreat next year. Anything more than that, though, would be too much. I’m slammed with work and family obligations. I don’t have any extra capacity. Plus, having other guys in my life has never been a priority for me. Some guys need it, but I don’t.

This kind of thinking is rooted neither in truth nor in the goodness of God. Think again.

One of the significant differences between heaven and earth is love. We take it a lot less seriously than God does. There’s so much we don’t know about him. He’s infinite and infinitely mysterious. But we do know this: love is at the core of everything God is and everything he does. 

“Love is from God,” wrote the apostle John (1 John 4:7). He even wrote, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). He personifies it. You see, while God is a person unto himself, he’s also actually, as Dallas Willard wrote, “a sweet society of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”(5). His very nature is that of a community of love—a corps of three persons who bestow unsparingly a deep and never-ending love upon one another.

God’s kind of love, therefore, is the community kind. The mutual kind. It demands another. In his kind of love, someone loves someone else. God loves Jesus. God loves the Holy Spirit. They both love him back (and each other). But that’s not all. He also created beings—people—beyond this tight community of three—lots of anothers. And because God loves us, you and me, “in the same way” that he loves Jesus, he invites us, too, into his sweet society (John 17:23). He invites us to participate in his community of boundless love. He invites us into his family.

But even that’s not all. When we come into God’s family, he helps us to participate as family members. He fills us with his love and empowers us to love others. He pours love into each of us so that we can experience and enjoy it, for sure, but also so that it overflows. So that we, in turn, can love him back, and so that we can love other people too—other anothers. He offers us all more than we can handle, so we can have plenty of love to give away.

His intention, his dream, is that this family of love grows and grows. It’s his great desire that all of his sons and daughters love each other just like he does. “A new commandment I give to you,” Jesus said, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). Nothing else in the world matters to him as much. Love, therefore, is our number one priority. “Above all,” wrote Peter, “keep loving one another earnestly” (1 Pet. 4:8). “Let all that you do be done in love,” added Paul (1 Cor. 16:14).

When all the blare and babble of this world recedes, we discover that these lives of ours are about one thing: love. Our every moment. Every decision. Every action. Every interaction. Everything about our existence. All of them—somehow, someway—are about love.

A private or individualistic faith in Jesus is a myth. An intellectual Christianity isn’t a thing. Christianity is a religion at work. It’s a religion-at-love. “There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one,” wrote that religious original Richard Rohr. (6) No one should ever read Scripture without also living Scripture, and living Scripture means living in community. Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do” (John 14:12). And what he did was get in close and love with vigor.

This is foreign thinking for some men, and it may be hard to hear. (It was for me.) It requires some rewiring. We’re a busy generation. There is never enough time to accomplish what we want to, which is to build impressive careers and splendid families for most of us. For most of us, therefore, community is something to fit in when it’s convenient. We like community, but on the side—and not too much.

If we ever desire connection and belonging, joy and peace, we’d prefer just to buy them—clean, quick, efficient. But it doesn’t work like that. Authentic community is never clean or quick, or efficient. And it isn’t a commodity, like an occasional golf vacation or an annual ski trip with the guys. You can’t get it by occasionally dropping in at a monthly men’s event or by simply attending your church’s annual men’s summit. 

Community isn’t a product; it’s a by-product. “Whoever does the will of God,” Jesus said, “he is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). And the will of God is, of course, love. Therefore, community forms—family forms—as a by-product of love. Community forms as we turn our care and attention away from ourselves and toward other people. 

When we do that, something shocking happens. We immediately begin getting access to the benefits of community. Those things we’ve been chasing—connection, belonging, purpose, significance, joy, peace, even healing—start flooding into our lives. When we stop trying to grasp for them by grasping at material things through achievement and accumulation, self-help and leadership books, substances, and distractions and instead focus on other people's needs, we begin getting what we’ve always wanted. By doing what Jesus said: by targeting love, we receive what we’ve always needed.

Questions to Ponder

1. Why do some men find it hard to engage with a men’s group or men’s ministry?

2. What’s the best “band of brothers” or men’s community you’ve ever been part of?

3. In what ways might a community of men provide connection, belonging, purpose, significance, joy, peace, and even healing?

Notes

5. “Dallas Willard’s Definitions,” comp. Bill Gaultiere, Soul Shepherding, March 31, 2020, www.soulshepherding.org/dallas-willards-definitions/.

6. Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 50.

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