We Love the People of God

Opening Prayer: 

Your people, God, are those from all ages and all nations whom you in Christ have loved, chosen, called, saved, and sanctified as a people for your own possession, to share in the glory of Christ as citizens of the new creation. As those, then, whom you have loved from eternity to eternity and throughout all our turbulent and rebellious history, we are commanded to love one another. For ‘since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another’, and thereby ‘be imitators of God . . . and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us’. Love for one another in your family is not merely a desirable option but an inescapable command. Such love is the first evidence of obedience to the gospel, the necessary expression of our submission to Christ’s Lordship, and a potent engine of world mission. Amen.

Reflection:

Love calls for unity. Jesus’ command that his disciples should love one another is linked to his prayer that they should be one. Both the command and the prayer are missional—‘that the world may know you are my disciples’, and that ‘the world may know that you [the Father] sent me’. A most powerfully convincing mark of the truth of the gospel is when Christian believers are united in love across the barriers of the world’s inveterate divisions—barriers of race, colour, gender, social class, economic privilege, or political alignment. However, few things so destroy our testimony as when Christians mirror and amplify the very same divisions among ourselves. We urgently seek a new global partnership within the body of Christ across all continents, rooted in profound mutual love, mutual submission, and dramatic economic sharing without paternalism or unhealthy dependency. And we seek this not only as a demonstration of our unity in the gospel, but also for the sake of the name of Christ and the mission of God in all the world.

Love calls for honesty. Love speaks truth with grace. No one loved God’s people more than the prophets of Israel and Jesus himself. Yet no one confronted them more honestly with the truth of their failure, idolatry, and rebellion against their covenant Lord. And in doing so, they called God’s people to repent, so that they could be forgiven and restored to the service of God’s mission. The same voice of prophetic love must be heard today for the same reason. Our love for the church of God aches with grief over the ugliness among us that so disfigures the face of our dear Lord Jesus Christ and hides his beauty from the world—the world that so desperately needs to be drawn to him. 

Love calls for solidarity. Loving one another includes especially caring for those who are persecuted and in prison for their faith and witness. If one part of the body suffers, all parts suffer with it. We are all, like John, ‘companions in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus’. We commit ourselves to share in the suffering of members of the body of Christ throughout the world, through information, prayer, advocacy, and other means of support. We see such sharing, however, not merely as an exercise of pity, but longing also to learn what the suffering church can teach and give to those parts of Christ’s body that are not suffering in the same way. We are warned that the church that feels itself at ease in its wealth and self-sufficiency may, like Laodicea, be the church that Jesus sees as the most blind to its own poverty, and from which he himself feels a stranger outside the door.

Closing Prayer: 

Jesus calls all of us disciples together to be one family among the nations, a reconciled fellowship in which all sinful barriers are broken down through his reconciling grace. We are a community of grace, obedience, and love in the communion of the Holy Spirit, in which your glorious attributes and the gracious characteristics of Christ are reflected, and your multi-coloured wisdom is displayed. As the most vivid present expression of your kingdom, we are the community of the reconciled who no longer live for ourselves, but for the Saviour who loved us and gave himself for us. Amen.

Ask God to pour out his spirit to stir us with a vision of the gospel for every person and family.