Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other. (Romans 12:10)Robert frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Imagine a place where people loved you unconditionally. Imagine a place where you could go when you feel happy, or sad, or need encouragement, or just feel like hanging around.
Imagine a place where, in spite of your problems and your failures, people would accept you.
That is what Jesus intended church to be.
Church was never intended to be a place where people went on Sundays and maybe Wednesday nights and sat around for an hour or so. Church was never intended to be a place that was just a building.
Church was meant to be a supportive body of believers, helping each other through life.
Someone said the other day that life in Jesus is not a series of destinations, it is a journey. And it is. It is not going to heaven that is important, it is the life in Jesus while we are going there.
And church is not about you and what you want. After all, the spotlight in life is not on you, it is on Jesus and his grace. When we shine that spotlight on what we want, we remove what is truly beautiful and graceful about church and replace it with something ugly.
Church is the place that people should come to be built up, to be loved in spite of their problems, to show and be shown the love of Jesus. At church, we help each other, we love each other, we support each other and we show each other the way to heaven and his grace.
When we love each other with genuine affection and take delight in honoring each other, we have fulfilled exactly that for which God put us here in the first place.
Jesus also said, By this shall all know that you are my disciples, that you love each other. (John 13:35) The mark of Christianity is love, not obedience, not tradition, not worship – it is love. Because, after all, love causes all else. And without love, all else is worthless.
This is how church should be. It isn’t and is rarely ever achieved. And that is the tragic part. It is like the couple who stay married, yet do not like each other that much. They eat together and sleep together, and go places together, yet their marriage has become a battlefield and a struggle.
What was to be beautiful and a life long joy has become a travesty.
When we forget the love and the honoring, when we focus on how we are “supposed to worship,” the gifts of the Spirit and the translations we use, church is useless. And it no loner honors God. It just honors us.
What a great place it could be if we did it God’s way.
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