“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35
“Helen” told us she couldn’t wait to load her visiting relatives from out of town into her car and drive them by our church. She said when she passed by, she rolled down her window, pointed at our church and shouted in the wind, “That’s the church where those men who painted my bathroom came from!”
It’s no secret that Jesus’ vision for the role his church would play in evangelizing the world was to so shock humanity by the way his followers loved each other that it couldn’t deny that a divine invasion had taken place. Jesus followed up his “new commandment” in the Last Night Discourses starting in John 13, quoted above, with this petition in his high priestly prayer in John 17:
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one I in them and you in me, so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them. (John 17:20-26, emphasis mine)
So tell me, what is your church known for? If you were to take a survey of 1,000 people in your community and ask them, “What’s the first word that comes to your mind when you think of [name of your church here]?” What would they say?
Jesus taught that the first word that should come to their minds is “love.”
Later, Helen, the single mom who drove by our church and pointed it out to her relatives, asked us, “Could you start a Bible study in my home?” Then she went door to door to all her neighbors on her block and invited them to come.
She told us she said the following to her neighbors, “You have to meet these men. You’ll never believe what they’ve done for me.”
Bingo.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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