Allowing ourselves to encounter and express the love of Jesus, I believe, starts with humility. By saying, “I need more of you Jesus.” By saying, “I don’t have your love all figured out. I could learn more about it, maybe a lot more. I could live your love more in the day to day, hour by hour moments of my life, maybe a lot more. Teach me to love like you love.” Allowing the love of Jesus to saturate our lives starts with humility. We allow Jesus to be our teacher, our guide, our mentor. Allowing the love of Jesus to bring peace in our land, therefore, starts with us. It requires vulnerability. Let yourself be loved by him, accept the astounding gift of his love in your life.
Back to the question of the week: what will it take to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America? As we are examining each part of the question, are you starting to see an answer take shape? The answer has something to do with Christians, followers of Jesus, freely choosing to make the love of Jesus the pattern and practice of their lives.
What about those who are not Christians? Can we force them to believe in and practice the love of Jesus? We could try, but would we want to? No. Free will says that we don’t want to force people to believe in or follow Jesus. We want them to be free, not coerced. That is the beauty of Freedom of Religion. And since this is a question that specifically asked about America, I’ll mention America now.
The United States is a place where all religious views are free to believe and practice their own unique point of view. In other words, the Christian theology of free will supports and encourages the right of people to not be Christian. I’m not saying that we agree with the theology of every other religion. I’m saying that we support their right to be different. That is freedom.
As a result, when the question mentions Jesus’ love, it means that we do not become belligerent and aggressive if there are people in our country or communities who do not agree with Jesus being God, or that Jesus’ particular kind of love is what they want to live their lives by. If we want the love of Jesus to bring peace, we live with love, even toward those we disagree with.
Look at the example of Jesus. The only people he became aggressive to, were people claiming to be God-followers who were legalistic and unloving, primarily the Jewish religious leaders. Jesus, in other words was only aggressive toward those in his own religious family.
That said, the kind of love that Jesus lived his life by, the kind of love he taught, is astounding in its purity, and even atheists have commended Jesus’ love as pure. So the question’s focus on Jesus’ love, I think, would hold true for nearly everyone. And that brings us to the final part of the question, the goal, peace.
In recent years, we have seen lots of unrest in the United States of America. I would argue that the amount of unrest we have seen pales in comparison to other eras in our nation’s history. The Civil War being the worst, by far. We’re nowhere close that level of unrest. Our current national climate also pales in comparison to the unrest going on in many other places in the world today. With that perspective in mind, do we need more peace in America in our day? Yes.
To talk about how to allow the love of Jesus to bring peace to America, I thought about simply re-posting my Purple Church posts from 2021. Some of you who were here then might remember that. Talk about unrest. 2020 was awful. 2021 wasn’t much better. In the summer of 2020, we were dealing with the Covid lockdown and massive disagreements about it. We were dealing with ethnic conflict. George Floyd and many, many other African-Americans had been shot. Third, it was an election year, so we had the intensity of the primaries, the conventions, the millions of political ads, and it was bitter. The upheaval was mountainous. And it pretty much continued right through 2021.
To address the unrest, I preached a sermon about how in the church, we are neither red nor blue. We are Christians, first and foremost. Jesus is our king. We pledge our allegiance to him. The church is a family where red-minded people and blue-minded people put the peaceful love of Jesus far above political ideology, and they practicing loving unity. Red and blue together make purple. One of our goals at Faith Church is to be a purple church, a church family where red and blue mix together in unity, focusing on the love of Jesus that brings them together in peace.
How do we do that? How do we mix when our culture has for years now become more and more divided? When I mention “mix”, I’m talking about peace. How do red and blue have peace? We’ll talk about that in the next post.
Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 