After Pentecost Devotional - Day 08

"If you love only those people who love you, will God reward you for that? Even tax collectors love their friends." Matthew 5:46

It is very easy to settle into a community of friends and stop seeing the larger world around us. On one level, it is a defense mechanism that allows us to live in larger communities. There are only so many people with whom we can relate at a deeper level. There are only so many stories we can keep track of. There are only so many hours in the week in which we can interact meaningfully with one another.

On the other hand, the kind of love Jesus speaks of does not always necessitate that we get to know others on a deep emotional level of connection. Sure, it is good to develop those bonds that allow us to create community. At issue, however, is learning to love and care for people beyond the limits of our bonds of emotional and social attachment.

How do you love a stranger? In many ways, that is what Jesus is asking us to do, isn't it? He asks us to love people we have not had the opportunity to spend time with, get to know, and interact with over time. He asks us to love the people we walk by on the sidewalk, the drivers we pass on our morning commute, and the people that our media and social circles would tell us to avoid.

Jesus asks us, no, tells us, that we are to place ourselves in what we consider vulnerable situations, in which we elect to love complete strangers. We are to treat them after the manner that we respond in love to our children, our friends, our parents, and our siblings. We are to offer them the same level of acceptance and welcome we would offer family or friends. We are to welcome strangers and people of unknown backgrounds into our lives as people loved by God.

Instead, we too often allow our society to dictate who are the safe people to love and accept. We allow society to tell us whom to vilify as unworthy, dangerous, and a threat to our safety.

We actually know better, but normally ignore the uncomfortable truth. We fear the stranger and treat them as dangerous, when the majority of violent crimes are committed by people who know their victims. Drug addicts steal from family and friends before they do so from strangers. Domestic violence accounts for over half of gun-related deaths in our nation. Sexual abuse is most often inflicted upon victims who are known, and yet we teach our children to fear strangers.

Jesus tells us to love them, instead. He tells us that it is the way of the world to love those who already love us. He tells us that God's way is more difficult, more exacting, and more worthy. God's way is to teach us to love everyone we meet, treating them as though they have already passed the test of belonging in our circles of friendship and belonging.

The easiest and simplest way to make a friend, after all, it so treat someone as a friend. The best way to love one another is to remember that God already loves us all.

Determine to assume people into your circle of belonging as part of God's family.


"Lord, help me to view the strangers around me as friends I simply have not yet met."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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