Divisions in the church and among God’s people are incredibly damaging and demoralizing. They completely destroy our focus on God and His presence and allow Satan to separate us from each other and harm our testimony in the process. We cannot be effective as ministers of the Gospel while we fight with our Christian brothers and sisters.
Mark 12:30-31 says “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. ’This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” It seems to me that if Jesus thought it important enough to call out these 2 commandments as the “greatest” then we would do well to listen.
Our interactions with each other should start and end with love. While misunderstandings and mistakes are a part of the human experience, as long as showing and giving and experiencing God’s love are first and foremost in our hearts and minds then forgiveness and healing will be a natural result. We must realize that we are all imperfect creatures who have been adopted into the family of God and no one is any more or less worthy of God’s grace. In this we are all the same. We have all come under the blood of Jesus and are the recipients of God’s great love and therefore have a responsibility to be ambassador’s to those who have not heard and have not seen.
That’s why it’s so harmful to our mission and our ministry when we fight and bicker among ourselves. Instead of love and unity the world looks at the family of God and often sees a family that is just as troublesome and divided as their own. Brothers and sisters, we must set aside our differences and come together. We must recognize that our God and our King is bigger and far more important than any issue we might have and as long as we seek to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength then we won’t have any room left for division.
I truly believe that as people grow closer to God they grow closer together. Unity and true brotherhood are a natural occurrence when people are focused on adoration, worship and submission to the Savior. When we fight and get our feelings hurt and drift away from one another it’s because we’ve stopped looking at Jesus and have lost our focus. Thankfully, it’s not too late to turn our eyes back on Him and restore the fellowship that has been broken.
I won’t tell you that this is an easy or natural thing. In fact it runs completely counter to human nature. It requires diligence and discipline and getting over ourselves and our pride. Only by living and walking in the Spirit is such a thing possible. My prayer today is that Christian brothers and sisters everywhere would set “self” aside and learn to live and walk in love. Only then can we truly come together.