The Romance of Romans-Part 113

[Michael]

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