High hopes


It is my hope that all the believers who remain steadfast, despite the times, will seek godly unity with and among all other true believers. We are all in this together and are stronger together than separated.

Several things will need to happen.


  • We will need to stop treating Christ's New Commandment as a footnote in the faith and treat it instead as a matter of highest priority. (John 13: 33-35, 15: 12-17, 17:11, 20-23).) Really loving and caring about one another is a difficult calling which we too frequently dodge. But we will need to take up the challenge and apply it across denominational boundaries. The scriptures tell us how to serve the brethren in practical ways that express godly love, so let's see that as guidance and a challenge.  
  • We will need to take seriously what Jesus taught us about calling one another raca and fool. We easily judge those who do not see things just as we do as blameworthy, but there is a certain injustice about that. Do you see with perfect clarity the dust in your brother's eye? We will need to take our own sophisticated theological opinions on nonessentials much less seriously: place them on the same level as the opinions of others. (Matt 5: 22.)
  • We will need to follow the apostle Peter's lead by including in the Christian pale all those who respond to, and with, the Holy Spirit. What God has cleansed, call not thou common. The presence and activity of the Holy Spirit is the test of who is with us in the great adventure of salvation. (Acts 11: 17-18.) That needs to replace our varying formulaic standards of institutional orthodoxy, at least when answering the question of who we are going to get along with. 


Doing those things will bring us around to the place that long centuries of divisive theologies have not: each of us acknowledging the miracle of salvation playing out in all the rest of us. It leads to us loving and cherishing one another because of the gift that is in us. That, as I take it, is the key to living out the New Commandment; you see your God, the same God who is in you, in other people and you love them for it.

It is obviously untrue that spiritual Christians are confined to a single denomination or a particular grouping of like-minded denominations; God has honored all those who have with honest hearts turned to him, even when they have had some points confused in their theologies.

So the presence of the Spirit in, with and among the faithful is the measure of who we are to love and serve. Perhaps it is the great simplicity of that idea that has obscured it for centuries.

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