Loving the Truth in Person

Either you love God and His people, or you don’t love God and His people. There really is no third way.

The two great commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. Loving your neighbor includes those who come to the Table with you here every week; it means loving your fellow church member. Now when bitterness or resentment creep in, or sometimes just simple dislike, very few people tell themselves that they are now “not loving their neighbor.”

What we tend to do instead is give ourselves a pass because we are still committed to the principle or idea of loving our neighbor, or we consider ourselves compassionate toward people generally. We think we are compassionate generally because we tear up in the right parts of the movie. But there is a difference between being sentimental and being tenderhearted. Sentimentalism is disobedient, and full of resentments, and tenderheartedness is obedient, and filled with compassion.

Drifting away from a congregation therefore begins with complaints against other people. Murmurs, grumbles, complaints, and so on, are directed against others for various reasons—because they took your seat, or because you think they are proud of their money, or because they are better looking than you are. Or murmuring begins against the leadership because of a decision that was made (or not made), or because of something said or done. The murmuring starts, not because you notice something, but rather because you refuse to ask about it. And by “ask,” I mean ask—not a querulous complaint molded into the shape of a question.

The Christian faith is necessarily and inevitably personal. We are committed to the ultimate Truth, but we confess that this ultimate truth is a person. And God has arranged it so that His truths come to us in the shape of other persons, our fellow Christians, with all their angularities. When we kick against this, we always start to drift.