This week I once again welcome guest blogger, Kirk Marks. Kirk is a retired pastor of 35 years who now works in international fair trade.
Do you like Taylor Swift?
Would you buy a Tesla?
Did you get a COVID shot?
Are you going to be kind to the lesbian couple that lives down the street from you?
These are not just things you have to make a decision about, they’re things that people are divided about. As soon as you say, “Yeah, I like Taylor Swift. I listen to her music,” somebody’s not going to like that, and they often have a whole list of reasons why.
People are taking sides about things which, in my adulthood lifetime, they never disagreed about before. We’re separated about so many topics. We’re even fighting about those topics.
In 2024 my church helped a refugee family from Africa resettle in our county. The family recently shared with us that they have friends from the refugee camp in Africa who are trying to relocate to the USA, but now can’t because of changes in immigration policy. Even though those refugees have been officially approved to start their journey to the USA, they are now being stranded.
Some Americans that think that is great. Other Americans think it is horrible. We are separated and divided on immigration, as we are on a thousand other things.
In our study this week of 1st Thessalonians 2:13–3:13, we’ve learned that Paul wrote the Thessalonian Christians to keep loving one another and the people around them.
What is it that makes it hard for us to love? What makes it hard for us to love each other here within the church? What makes it hard for us to love the people around us? One thing that makes that difficult is the deeply divided nature of our culture and society.
Tragically, many people think their Christian faith tells them what side of these issues to be on. A few months ago a young mom was shopping in my store with her little daughter, four or five years old, coloring in her coloring book. Right in front of me, the girl was coloring a rainbow. I overheard her mother say, “Oh, no, honey, we don’t like rainbows. We’re Christians.” We can think our Christian faith’s value is it tells us what side of these issues to be on.
Paul says to the Thessalonians, “I hope that you can be righteous and pure right up to when you appear before God on Judgment Day at the last day.” (1 Thessalonians 3:13) When Paul writes that, I have in my mind’s eye a picture of some Christians appearing before God at the last day and saying to him, “God, we were on your side. Every issue, we chose your side. We did the right thing because we were on the side that you wanted us to be on.”
Then I can hear God saying back to them, “Well, that’s okay, but how did you treat the people on the other side?”
Without a whole lot of thought, they’ll say, “We hated them. We were against them. They were stupid. They were idiots. We made fools out of them. We didn’t like them. We didn’t talk to them. Because they were on the wrong side. They were opposed to what was right.”
That’s the opposite of what Jesus has taught us. Jesus said, “Love one another.” If you disagree with somebody about some issue so much that they’re your enemy, Jesus said, “Love your enemies. Even if they’re persecuting you, pray for them.”
We have to relearn how to love our enemies. We have to unlearn our habit of falling into the divisions of the society around us. Let us relearn how to love others. To put aside division, look beyond the issues and see people as people God loves and as people we need to love too.
Paul said, “May your love for one another continue, and may that love overflow to those around you.” (1 Thessalonians 3:12). That’s what I want to see the church be. That’s what I wish as a denominational administrator I would have written to churches, as I mentioned in the previous post.
I should have written to those churches, “What we want from your church is to be a place where people look at your church family and say, ‘People love there. People there love me. People who go to that church, I know they just are loving people. They care about their neighbors. They love one another. They love everybody around them. They look past a whole lot of disagreements and love anyway.'”
I hope we can relearn love in the midst of our society that doesn’t look like it’s getting any less divided. The number of issues dividing people seem to multiply, not shrink.
In contradiction to that division, I hope we Christians love people even very different than we are. We love people who maybe even really disagree with us. We love people who we don’t like for a lot of reasons.
We still love them. Because what Jesus has called us to do is what he himself has done. He has come, loving us so much that he gave his life for a people who didn’t deserve it, including you and me. He calls us to love one another in that way. So, while the book of 1 Thessalonians wasn’t originally written to us in 2025, we can certainly learn some things from the priority of love shown there.
Can we love one another? Can we hear God’s call to do that even in really difficult times? I hope we can. I hope we will. I hope we’ll seek to try. I hope we’ll hear the Holy Spirit working in us to grow in us that Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23).
Photo by Robert V. Ruggiero on Unsplash
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