Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
Eph. 1:3-6
Paul, writing to the Christians in Ephesus, begins with their fundamental identity as children of God. Among the far-reaching implications of this statement, which we cannot explore here, this means we in the Church are fundamentally brothers and sisters (all members of one another, as Romans 12:5 puts it). Those of us with siblings know that does not correlate to “people who get along easily” all or even most of the time. It does mean that no matter what we do to each other, we will be drawn back together at the end of things. It also leaves us with responsibilities to one another.
Drawing on the analogy of a human family, we can see that it will result in some amount of unity in diversity (Romans 12, 1 Cor. 12). This is not a vision of a family which imposes conformity and looks down its nose at anyone different, grateful for any excuse not to have to let them in. Instead, the love we see in God is expansive. Not content with the company of his own perfect self, he made us; not content with the one family he calls at various times (Adam and Eve, Noah and his immediate family, Abraham and Sarah and co.), he turns families into nations; not content with having chosen one nation, from the very beginning of the Law he makes provision for outsiders to enter it (Exodus 12:48, Ezra 6:21); not content with redeeming one nation, he redeems them all (Acts 10). He seems to be always starting families small so as to make them bigger. This causes some upheaval in people’s established ideas of what the given group (family, nation, etc.) is, but that seems to be his way too.
The household of God (1 Tim. 3:15) should, therefore, not think of itself as designed to be as small as possible, excluding as many people as possible, like a family that bids farewell to its daughters forever when they get married rather than deal with the tricky question of whether sons in law count as sons. Rather, the household of God, and the individual people who make it up, should know his generous expansive love. He adopted us (Ephesians 1) and not because we were anything special, either; should we, while claiming to follow his example, decline to adopt others? Should we who have been generously grafted in to his chosen people (Romans 11) turn up our noses at the thought of letting other people become part of us? Quite the contrary! We have been adopted — it would be silly not to adopt others or to extend to them the grace (by definition undeserved) which God first extended to us.
It may be significant that adoption is Paul’s preferred metaphor. A household is suited to growth through bringing in people who previously shared no ties. He could have chosen a metaphor more friendly to human reasoning and our tendency toward cliques, but he did not. The definition of household in his time included a collection of people living together, not limited to the nuclear family but also the paterfamilias’ elderly relatives; slaves; in-laws; poor relations; visiting relations; friends who stay for a while; and so on. This resulted in different responsibilities to people of differing needs, social classes (as then understood; of course the Christian understanding revolutionizes this too), precise relationships, etc. In the local church this looks like having a flexible approach to discipleship, and a recognition that different people will have different needs.
As with earthly families, our bond does not arise because we have any natural affinity for each other, but because we have the same father. (For an excellent sermon on this see Pastor David de Bruyn on ‘The Bible’s Paternity Test’.) By the same token, agape is a fruit of the Spirit and not manufactured, so we shouldn’t try to manufacture it, or feel guilty when we can’t drum up fuzzy feelings, but ask God to give it us.
What is love? “Christ. . . loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). We see love in what Christ did for us, and are to imitate him in our relations with “the brother[s] for whose sake Christ died” (1 Cor. 8:11). He made clear (John 13, 15, etc.) that we are to love our brothers in the small ordinary things of life, not just in the big heroic chances which don’t come along nearly as often. And he warns us that “the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).
When the members of the body love one another well — and once in a blue moon, by the grace of God, so they do — it is beautiful. We have ample anecdotal evidence that the beauty of a faithful church draws people — and that power lies not (solely) in the physical beauty of the sanctuary, but in the beauty of people clearly loving God and one another. When a church rallies around someone in crisis, or supports a member through the dreary work of long illness or age, or holds a spiritually drowning person’s head above water, we recognize something good and true and beautiful there: this is what the Church is made for: this is how God loves us, how we are supposed to be like him, in being his hands and feet for one another. At such times, the church is a powerful witness to God: we might not ordinarily have chosen the people God brings to the same community, so if we love them it is clearly a work of God.
Love doesn’t remain just words or warm feelings, but becomes incarnate in deeds (as I have loved you), and leads to responsibilities: encourage each other, hold each other accountable, develop skills, work together, build something good — all the things we promise to each other in the sight of God in the church covenant.
One of these is spiritual friendship. One Christian meeting another in the wild recognizes a deep bond between them to which the usual determining factors of temperament, interests, agreement, etc. make no difference. Christians within a local church, who share some elements of their daily lives with each other, should have relationships which go beyond the superficial. If they do not, something deeper is in need of healing.
“Jesus was going to die. . . in order that He might also gather together into one all the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:51-52). As we linger in the now-and-not-yet, waiting for that final gathering, we always ought to remember who our household is, loving our Father and practicing loving our siblings, showing the world, in the words of one of the Church’s oldest hymns, that “where charity and love are, there God is.”
Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®
Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995
by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Italics are used in the NASB to indicate words which are not found in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek but implied by it.