Our Bible commands us to be loving, forgiving, and practice humility. However, the world sees Christians as arrogant, angry, and hypocritical. How did this happen? We're missing the mark severely, and not only does it reflect poorly upon us, but it also reflects poorly on Christ and hurts our ability to affect the world.
I feel like Ghandi summed it up pretty well by saying, "I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Frankly, this should break our hearts. We say that we love our neighbors (When Jesus said neighbor, it was code for everyone), but the world doesn't see it. The world doesn't see that we love them, in fact many people feel as though Christians are hateful.
This issue has come up a lot in the recent Gay Marriage debate. Christians have gotten up in arms saying that gay couples should not be allowed to be married. This isn't meant to be a political debate, or even a gay marriage debate, but rather my focus is on how we as Christians are handling the situation.
The common Christian mantra has become, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." That is a great philosophy on paper, but the problem is that these "sinners" don't feel loved by Christians. Generally speaking, gay couples and supporters of gay marriage feel like Christians hate them and target them as being worse sinners than everyone else (that's a whole other blog post for a future time). But Christians insist that it is not the sinner that they are targeting, but rather the sinful act, so why do gays feel like Christians hate them? Where is the disconnect?
I believe that the key that we so often miss is that love is a verb. Words of love don't carry any weight if they aren't followed up by loving actions. Love is expressed through words, but shown through actions. Christians may claim to love the sinner, but how do we show it? Weither we as Christians are supporting gay marriage or fighting against it, we need to adjust the way that we show our love for our neighbors. I don't have an nice clean answer for how to fix this, but we are obviously missing the mark. Our every action as Christians needs to be drivin by love, because it is through love that we reflect the grace of Christ in our lives.
Because at the end of the day everything we do as Christians is absolutely worthless if we do not love. It doesn't matter if we have great worship services, nice church buildings, give to missions, or even bring many to Christ if we don't love those around us. We have failed if we don't love.
1 Corinthians 13 is commonly used during weddings to talk about the love of a married couple, but that wasn't even close to what Paul was talking about. Paul was writing to the Corinthian church about the way that they were not loving their neighbors. They were failing to love the non-church members of Corinth and even those within the church; they were failing to show Christ's love to those around them. If we read it in the light of how we as Christians interact with our world, it blows my mind.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
It's easy to say we love our neighbors, but what happens when that love becomes difficult or inconvenient? What happens when love needs to become more than just a word? It is easy to love those that look nice, smell nice, have the same political views as us, and share a similar theology. However, what happens when our neighbor doesn't believe what we believe, or acts in ways that we consider sinful? Do we still love them then? How do we show it? Because at the end of the day everything we do as Christians is absolutely worthless if we do not love. Even if we say that we love sinners but we do not show it with action, the world will always see Christians as hypocritical, angry, and hateful.
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