To Live the Love of Christ: the Church’s Biggest Challenge
The New Testament reveals the Church as being a community of people gathered around Jesus – disciples, people committed to Him, people who worship Him and are willing to serve His Kingdom on earth. Following Jesus is way more than having a relationship with him, but is also having a relationship with those who follow Him.
God allowed us to have the same Father-Son relationship that He has with Jesus. That privilege is available for all of us, it’s ours to have. In Christ, we’re all members of a big family - God’s family. He is our Father, Jesus is our older brother, and we are brothers and sisters of all God’s children. This brotherhood is stronger than the human kinship, for the flesh bond is temporary. But the spiritual brotherhood is forever.
Therefore, it’s our duty to treat each other as brothers and sisters. God wants His children to live together in harmony, and for this His advices given to us cover every kind of situation we might face, so that we know how to live with our brothers and sisters. To live in harmony, in the same way it happens with music, the strongest notes between God’s children is love.
The opposite of love is not necessarily hate, but selfishness and individualism. The selfishness shows itself on people through an excessive care for themselves and a lack of interest towards other people. This is noticeable when every hint of affection and effort from someone converges to himself. In other hand, loving is giving, to love is to surrender, and it’s what leads us to the community life.
Jesus is the incarnation of love, the practical and invisible true expression of love. He brought the true love to the world. His disciples appreciated this love in a practical dimension and not in theoretical definitions. Jesus said that the outstanding feature of the disciple community would be the love they would have among them: “By this shall all [men] know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.”
God’s purpose is that we become similar to Jesus in everything, and the main feature, which outstands in His life and character, is Jesus’ love for us. We can believe that, in spite of our weaknesses and imperfections, through the Holy Ghost given to us we can love like Jesus did!
