It looks like food and shelter to the hungry, and kindness and compassion to the broken hearted and bleeding. The church in this world today has never been as divided as it is right now. One group believes this, another believes that, and someone else pronounces them both wrong and postulates something else! And so we end up dividing our churches, our fellowships, or even our families over doctrine. We’ve forgotten that our focus comes off love when we drone on and on about doctrine. 

You know popularity is not a sign of being right, it can often mean we are tickling other people’s ears. Plus, being right is not as important as living a life of love for others. Only Almighty God is good. Only Jesus Christ is perfectly right. Only the Holy Spirit through the bible can shed His love abroad in our own hearts and through us. Everything else fades into insignificance without that kind of love. Christians can be doctrinally right, but still have their hearts ‘far from Him.’ (Matthew 15:18)

Jesus’ disciples followed the Lord around for over three years and they proved how wrong human beings could be … even though they were walking around and living with God Himself! Adam and Eve lived in God’s Presence daily, and still made terrible decisions. These two things alone show us how much power there is in our personal choices. God gave us the power to choose Him and His Ways for ourselves. His ways are motivated by LOVE.

But when the Holy Spirit came in the book of Acts, He unified those men and women in the upper room, in an extraordinary way – they went from being fearful to being bold – they were prepared to die to tell others Who Jesus Christ is. His Love and passion came into their midst, and fear and intimidation went straight out of the window. The Holy Spirit began to do something so incredible at that time that Jesus’ disciples didn’t have a “box” to put it in! That’s because Almighty God went right round people’s boxes and made His home in human hearts. They lived their lives so saturated, they simply had to tell others what they knew. 

Guys, the body of Christ needs to make the main thing the main thing. Are we loving others? Can we be found guilty, as individuals and churches, of truly laying our lives down and loving the unloveable? Jesus did it! This world is going to hell in a hand basket all around us, because we’ve been arguing over stuff that won’t matter a fig when we see Him face to face. In that moment, we will all fall on our faces and worship Him. All of our arguments and debates will not amount to a hill of beans in His Presence. 

However right now, we can easily bicker about this rule and that revelation, because we are not living in His Presence! Like so many other saints who have gone before us, we’ve been lulled off to sleep by comfort, safety, and self-preservation. Me too. 😢 We all need to remember that billions of people do not know how much Almighty God loves them because inside the church we are fighting to be right. 

There are well-meaning Christian people who want to corner the market on selling: ‘their tapes, their CDs, their DVDs, their music, their podcasts, their sermons.’ All that energy, creativity, even our supposedly brilliant minds could be put to better use by following Jesus down, down, down onto the lower road that He walked on. We are so busy trying to make a name for ourselves, we’ve forgotten HIS NAME IS HIGHER THAN ANY OTHER NAME.

Our righteousness comes from Him. And if Jesus said: ‘they’ll know we are Christians by our love…’  then it’s that simple. Love Him, love others. You can teach an infant that. We need to focus on loving others and leave the doctrinal issues to those who have nothing better to do. I ask myself this question all the time. “Is there evidence in my life right now, that I am following Jesus and LOVING OTHERS like He would?” 

And if you are unsure of what His idea of love looks like, try I Corinthians 13, or Colossians 3. The stuff in those verses will keep anyone busy for the rest of their lives. Love is the key that will unlock people’s closed hearts. Jesus came and died to give us the privilege of putting that key into action in a loveless world. We daily take His love and forgiveness in, and we give His love and forgiveness out. It’s that simple.  Bye. 👋🏻