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Love Won’t Stop: Ministry Never Ends

September 23, 2019

A year ago around this time I really was not sure what I believed. God, who I had known so intimately in high school, seemed like a friend that had moved away and our contact had become less and less frequent. I was holding onto memories and a past intimacy while not pursuing making new intimacy and depths within my faith in a present tense. When Francis Chan came to Convocation and then Campus Community last semester, he said things that made me question everything. Did I truly believe? Was the Holy Spirit really within me? Was I just someone who was going along with a man-made wave?I rededicated my life to Christ that night; rededicated, not started my life with, as my relationship with God started in high school and was still very much intact (albeit dim) within that low season.

Since then, I’ve seen steady growth and my passion increase as I have made greater efforts to spend more time with God in prayer and in studying His word. But as I reflected on the whole experience of questioning my faith, I realized something: there undoubtedly are people who call themselves Christians that truly are not.This is not to say they are trying to fool everybody, they may just not even know what it all means. Perhaps they were deceived by the prosperity gospel or they figured that since they were nice, went to church, and acknowledged the existence of God and Jesus then they must be set. Whatever the reason being, it is clear that outside of those who blatantly are not believers and do not claim to be, there are many within the pool of those who think they are found that are actually lost. Barna Research indicates a shocking number of Americans believe good works result in going to Heaven, with 55 percent of Americans surveyed believing that “if a person is generally good, or does good enough things for others during their life, they will earn a place in Heaven.”1

This reality puts forth a calling for each of us to examine our lives in the light of Jesus’ amazing grace and Scripture’s hard truths. Thoroughly study 1 John, assess what you believe, examine whether you are producing Fruit of the Spirit, talk to a pastor – assurance of salvation is a peace worth pursuing, and even if all it does is affirm your salvation, a reminisce of the love poured out on you by God with the Gospel is time well spent.

Outside of assessing ourselves, the fact that we are unaware who truly is a believer and who is not calls for us to treat others differently as well. With the knowledge that there are those who live among us, work with us, volunteer with us, go to church with us, and worship with us that do not believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior, we should be moved to love, action, and proclamation of the Gospel. No one is exempt from needing the Gospel proclaimed and displayed to them. 

Love should be radiating from us as well as grace and mercy; we should not be guilting or shaming unbelievers for being away from home, but instead encouraging them to come home and then celebrating them and Jesus if or when they finally come home, much like how the Father responded in the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. The model of love and kindness set by Jesus throughout Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John should be imitated by us not just to the atheists, but also to the religious, the believer, and the agnostic as well.

I have unfortunately been around people within ministries who are just as nice and loving as they can be to people that come to their ministry (and are the ones designed by the program to be evangelized to), but behind the scenes they treat their underlings, fellow believers, and co-ministry operators like the scum of the Earth. I believe this happens partly because subconsciously they think since they were already in Christ, they did not need to keep up appearances around a person, and that gave them license to not be evangelistically minded. The mark of Christians should be kindness despite the mission of evangelism being accomplished, because that is only part of the mission; we are called to make disciples. Kindness, “the opposite of brutal, harsh, hurtful, uncaring, rude, and such like”2should be a part of disciple making, putting on display the standard you want those you are discipling to exemplify.

While you may recognize that a person follows Jesus, worships, serves, and trusts in the Lord, that should not excuse you from loving, serving, and encouraging them in Christ like you would an unbeliever. A person’s salvation grants them no exemption from needing to be shown love, kindness, and gentleness by others; we all need the Gospel daily – ministry can’t stop and shouldn’t stop, ever, to all people, regardless of their state of life. As Martin Luther once wrote:

“The highest of all God’s commands is this, that we ever hold up before our eyes the image of his dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. He must daily be to our hearts the perfect mirror, in which we behold how much God loves us and how well, in his infinite goodness, as a faithful God, he has grandly cared for us in that he gave his dear Son for usDo not let this mirror and throne of grace be torn away from before your eyes.”3

We will fall short at loving people all the time: we are but humans. We have bad days, people perceive things oddly, things may not come across as we want; we are not perfect, but there is grace for that from our Heavenly Father, but the effort needs to be there to love everybody always despite what state of life (meaning alive in Christ or not) they are in. Part of love is kindness (1 Corinthians 13) which means sharing hard truths with someone, but that does not mean doing so without gentleness or with total disregard for the fact that something may be hard to swallow; rhetoric, tone, and phrasing all matter when sharing truth in love and all of those things matter when interacting with our neighbors daily. Love the people you are trying to share Jesus with and love the people you are in Christ with all the same; ministry and love does not stop once the person is in Christ with you, it just broadens.

 

Sources

1https://www.barna.com/research/state-church-2016/

2https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/883-magic-of-kindness-the

3Tappert, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, p. 116.


Written by: Landen Swain

Landen believes the human experience longs to be expressed; through our art, our labor, our songs, our storytelling. As a published playwright, author, and poet, he enjoys expressing his little chapter of the human experience through his writings and is thankful that the SA blog allows him to do that. He is published in numerous magazines, literary journals, and has several plays published by Off the Wall Plays, an online play publishing house.