There are plenty of things you learn on the World Race. How to live in community, how to rely on God, how to pack all of your belongings in less than 30 minutes, etc. Yet if you had to boil the World Race into one verse, it’s quite simple:
Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and withal your soul and with all our mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.”
-Matthew 22:37-39
I love when God puts a bunch of different things in your life to make you figure something out. In the last week, I’ve read several blogs (check them out here and here), read 2 books, and heard a sermon about loving people as God has loved. And it’s wrecked me again.
We’ve all heard that we need to love as Jesus loved, but let’s be honest here; the church has SUCKED at this. Sure, there are some exceptions. But a majority of the world doesn’t hate “Christianity” because we’ve truly loved them like Jesus loved and they have misinterpreted it.
No, in the last 2 millennia, we’ve had crusades that killed millions of Muslims, started inquisitions, fought with Christians with opposing views, fled to America…and slaughtered the Indians and enslaved Africans, and that’s just a glimpse of our past.
Look at us today: hating gays, judging those who have abortions, deporting hard-working immigrants, calling every Muslim a terrorist, and “promoting freedom” by encouraging wars in oil-exporting countries while neglecting the genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Burma.
I don’t know about you, but none of that looks like love to me. We were not placed on this earth to tell everyone else while they were wrong; we must love as Christ has loved. We must be full of grace, slow to anger, abounding in love.
True love requires sacrifice, but most Christians today, myself included, don’t truly sacrifice. We are all comfortable with our lives and don’t want to put unwanted “stress” on ourselves. That’s not what Jesus would say. He wouldn’t care about political agendas or what people would think or what it meant for his “personal time.”
Our ministry here in Malaysia is difficult because, while it’s easy to begin conversations with locals, once we bring up the fact that we are working with a church, everyone close off and don’t want to hear anything about it. And this isn’t only true in Malaysia; it’s true pretty much across the globe.
If that’s not an indicator of where Christianity stands today, I don’t know what is. And that breaks my heart.
Love God.
Love your neighbor.
That’s it. Love people.
Is that easy? Of course not. It requires sacrifice. It means you will almost certainly be hurt in your life. But is it good? You bet.
Going back to the verse from a previous blog, Hebrews 12:1-2 says:
“…Let us through off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”
Trying to truly love like God loves makes no sense by world standards (everything that hinders). It will require perseverance, it will be a daily challenge, but God will bless you. You may not have a lot of money or physical comforts, but the relationship you’ll have with the Lord will make every second more than worth it.
Over the last 11 months I have seen countless examples of people loving like Christ love, and it’s a beautiful thing.
