Chapter 15 cont’d:
Now may the God of patience and comfort help you to live in deep harmony of spirit with one another so that with unified hearts and voices you may, in concert, glorify God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, accept one another just as Christ, to honor his Father, has accepted each of us.
Comments:
The remaining paragraphs of Romans 15-16 are various inspired endings to this great epistle. The above section could have been put at the very end as a benediction, but there are a few other things that Paul just has to say before the real end comes.
A part of dwelling in the “sweet society” of the community of Christ, to which I referred in my last post, revolves around a basic core value of “receiving” and “accepting” one another as spiritual kinfolk, if we name the name of Christ as our Lord. The body of Christ on earth is not yet a perfect community (nor or its many individual members) and we will certainly need the patience and comfort that our Father in heaven provides if we are to experience the kind of “harmony in concert” for which the apostle prays. (One preacher stated, “The Church is like Noah’s ark…if it weren’t for the flood outside, you couldn’t stand the smell inside”! Maybe he was a bit too jaded, but there is some realism to the joke. Eugene Peterson has cautioned us in his writings about the problems that come from “idealizing” the visible church. I fell prey to this in my early days in ministry.)
Somehow we must find ongoing grace from God to seek to live out our ideals in our communities of faith without succumbing to either relational cynicism or relational idolatry.
In John’s gospel, Jesus also prayed for this kind of glorious relational unity among those who chose and those who would, in the future, choose to follow him. And…he stated that the world would both know that we are his disciples and that the Father had truly sent him because of the quality of unity and love that characterizes our relationships as fellow believers.
The love and unity among the followers of Jesus Christ is to be like a wonderful and mysterious magnetic force that pricks the consciences of those who have yet to believe in Jesus and stir them to seek out how they also might experience the kind of “basic acceptance” and “noble purpose” they long for, but fail to find in the Christ-less institutions of this age.
One of the greatest helps to the personal faith of my children was when they witnessed the innate love and unity we all experienced with “strangers” from other cultures, who also followed Jesus, whom we visited in our travels and who often visited with us in our home. When their faith was tested in young adulthood by their exposure to the secularized higher education of our culture, they remembered and compared the quality of love they witnessed and experienced in our family…and even cross-culturally…with the lack of love they witnessed in the lives/relationships of many “educated” and “successful” people who were not following Christ. In remembering they realized that they were deeply marked by the love of God and never found it necessary to walk away from the faith in Jesus they confessed as little kids. Rather, they committed themselves to their Savior afresh…in a fully-adult way…and each one, along with his/her spouse (4 of our 5 are now married), walk closely with him today.
I must confess that my papa’s heart bursts like the apostle John’s, “I have no greater joy than…that my children walk in truth.” 3 John 4
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