It occurred to me one evening as I sat before my fire and was musing this line of thinking that it seemed to me that every Christian of great conviction with whom I had ever made a real acquaintance was also a person of great love. How could it be otherwise? Our Lord himself said that "greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friend." (John 15:13). Then, in Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus declares that the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is to love "thy neighbor as thy self." Did Jesus literally exhibit in his own life this profound utterance of love for God and man? Obviously he did with his tortuous death at Calvary; and his apostles, According to tradition, with the exception of John who was boiled in oil, all the other of our Lord's apostles were martyred because, as men of conviction, they also possessed unquenchable love. In fact, their flint-like conviction and passionate love for God and man were so strong that they were transformed from eleven cowards hiding for fear of their lives in Jerusalem into flaming evangelists who some Bible scholars estimate led over 600,000 to salvation in Christ in the following six months of their experience in the upper room!
In this era of human history, I have pondered if I am a dinosaur, a relic, of a bygone age of preachers of the gospel. I have given my life to the fulfillment of Ephesians 4:15 which affirms that we should speak the truth in love. In this modern era it seems that American preachers are not martyred but are scoffed, ridiculed or abhorred if they preach with passion on subjects such as hell or the sure judgment of God. Yet, it is simply the underlying truth of the Bible that Jesus came to save sinners with his atoning death, and that death is the single greatest expression of love in human history. It was the great Prince of Preachers, Dr R G Lee, who responded to someone calling him cruel because he preached on hell by saying, "I'd rather be called cruel by telling you about hell so as to keep you from going there than to not be called cruel by not telling you and letting you go."
What are some guideposts for biblical loving and selfless conviction? Here are only a few:
* We cannot allow ourselves to be caught up in the self-help ministries that center on how to become a better person outwardly unless that ministry begins with urging you to experience a transformational change toward loving God intimately and actively caring about the spiritual destiny and physical needs of one's fellow man with a work of the Holy Spirit wrought first inside your own heart. We simply must avoid the current philosophy espoused by one pastor who said, "My church is growing because I make them laugh, I make them cry, I make them feel religious."
*We must avoid the temptation to turn the church into a powerless collection of cliques with each one vying for dominant leadership. It has grieved me to watch, for example, as sincere men of Calvinist persuasions have so thoroughly organized themselves in an effort to control a major denomination. Do not misunderstand me. This is not a diatribe opposing the theology of reformed theology, including Calvinism; it is, however, a sure sign of any group's failure to love as our Lord commanded when any group resorts to organizational manipulation. I heard Dr Adrian Rogers once say, "The way to tell a false pastor from a true pastor is easy. A false pastor wants you to BELIEVE SOME THING. A true pastor wants you to RECEIVE SOME ONE!"
*We must be willing to forgive....anyone. Corrie Ten Boom, as a child, was held in a concentration camp by Nazis. She saw her sister horribly raped again and again. Corrie hated one man in particular who could have stopped it all. She hated him intensely. After WWII had ended, some years later, she saw this man enter the rear of a church where she was speaking. Oh, how she hated him! At the end of the service, he made his way through the crowd and extended his hand while asking for her forgiveness. Every fiber in her was rejecting his hand, but the crowd was watching so she reached forward. She later said that she never felt the love of God engulf her as it did that night she forgave someone she had hated so much.
In conclusion, I was on a tour bus in Cairo, Egypt on an occasion. I asked the tour guide, a Muslim lady, if she had ever considered the claims of Christ. Her answer has troubled me ever since. She said she had considered conversion to Christ, but she further stated that most of the tourists she served were Christians. Simply listening to them chat on the bus, at meal time or at ancient artifacts, she discovered that they didn't really love each other, much less people of other religious faiths or no faith at all, by their petty jealousies and idle gossip, so her conclusion was that Jesus was no better God than any other.
Do you want to change the world and make it better for your children and grandchildren? Jackie DeShannon had a hit in the sixties with "What The World Needs Now Is Love, Sweet Love." Jesus said it better in John 13:35 "By this shall men know that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another."
