“Here is love as vast as the ocean” – thank you Lord that I have been a recipient of that vast, immeasurable love.
”My Name, my very nature is made up from this attribute. The way I act, the way I see my creation, the way I see you, is through this vast filter of love. It is my longing that you may come to know over time how high, how wide, how deep and how long my love is and that it may make up the intimate experience of your relationship with Me. My whole program for you all is to bring you to a place where My love will become more and more real to you. And it is not directed randomly, it is directed at you and every person that reads this blog, personally.”
Read Romans 15:1-12. Paul is still expanding the theme arising from 12:1,2, ie the life the reader should be living in the light of the transformed life, arising from Jesus’ death on the cross. We have seen that we, as individuals, must show a changed life, and then flowing from that the witness of the church as a group of people transformed by God’s love. Chapter 14 dealt with grey areas and we now come to the major issue which has been appearing from time to time, all along in this letter, ie the issue of the relationship between Jew and Gentile.
This was a huge subject at that time. On the one hand the Jew who still felt they had the inner track, as it were to heaven, because of their whole OT history. Historically they had been warned to separate themselves from the pagan world around them. This resulted in totally different religious and social cultures. I suppose a little like our forebears felt about the black indigenous folk in this country. To get these two groups to work together was hard, but imagine the difficulty of persuading them to love one another.
In this passage Paul tackles the Jewish idea that the scriptures called on the Jews to keep themselves separate . Paul makes the point that even from the time of the Patriarchs there was a provision made for the Gentiles. The fact is that the idea of God was always that His people would represent Him to the Gentiles so that they also could be included in His future Kingdom. And he shows this quoting a number of OT scriptures. The coming of Christ has made this much more possible removing the previous barriers.
Without getting into the minutia of each verse the central command in verse 7 Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, summarises Paul’s teaching here and is pretty much a universal command to all Christians everywhere. That is Christ’s word to us today. In Philippians 2 Paul uses a similar argument, but going further says “in humility consider others better than yourselves. This requires a real transformation of our minds, since we are all basically self-centred by nature.
It is, however, the oil that allows every growing church to reflect Jesus’ love within the church, as well as outwardly to the community outside. Let the challenge to us today therefore be to give attention to this command, asking Jesus to help us through His Spirit, to accept every Chrsitian brother or sister, especially those who we actually don’t particularly like for whatever reason.
May God bless you all till next week.