Loving the Saints

“For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints,  I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers,” (Ephesians 1: 15-16, ESV)

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: “The Church would be so much easier to serve in… if it weren’t for the people!”

And while I can agree; some people are hard to love because they neglect to treat their church family with the respect and love they’d like to be treated with. Some people are lonely or without blood-related family they can rely on, and so they lean on their church family more than the average person or they come across as clingy. Even more than that, there are some that are newer to the faith and have a more juvenile view of theology or their perception of God is a little more skewed.

For those people, why would they want to know or understand more Biblical truth or lay aside their preconceived notions of God to know Him more as He is if His people are dismissive or disparaging to their newer brothers and sisters in Christ?

For Paul, His understanding of the Gospel and of God was deep. He was a mature Christian. He was imprisoned in a Roman cell likely between 60 and 64 AD. At this point, He has traveled to different early churches, he has helped to build and install eldership in these churches, and his faith and convictions are  well established.

In this letter to the Ephesians, he is writing to a church of people who he has heard from others are doing well in serving the Lord and continuing to fight the fight of faith. He has heard of them and how they’re doing. And among all the things he’s heard, is that this church in Ephesus not only loves the Lord, but they love all the saints. They love each other. 

I can imagine that even for that time, Paul knows how precious that love for one another is. If that church is anything like the church can be today, that love and respect for all saints is rare. Not just the saints that believe everything you do down to the minutest detail. Not just the saints who are as mature as you are. Not just the saints that you happen to get along with.

All the saints. All the ones who are chosen by God as His people, and even those that are still in the process of discovering who He is.

That means, loving even the Christians that subscribe to theological sources or trust in flawed theology. That means loving even those Christians who are still figuring out their convictions or what they believe about any given Biblical topic. That means loving those brothers and sisters in Christ that just rub you the wrong way because they’re bristly or disagreeable. 

Because Paul makes a distinction there in verse 15: he has heard of their faith in the Lord not because they love God so well. Not because their worship is so rehearsed. Not because the message from their pulpit was so rock-solid. He has heard of their faith in the Lord because of their love for all the saints.

Loving each other isn’t something we do simply because Jesus said to. Of course, we follow His command to love our neighbor as ourselves, but loving each other is not done because it’s a chore Jesus asked us to do to help build the church.

Loving each other is part of the evidence that God has transformed us and that we are walking with Him by faith. In our own flesh, we don’t love one another. Without God, we treat each other as well as we can, but we still gossip and find fault in one another. Without God’s love, ours is inconsistent and self-obsessed. So that love of the saints is something that Paul gives thanks to God for and something he notes as memorable. 

Sometimes, we can love each other like it’s an obligation, or like it’s something we know we’re supposed to do. Sometimes, we do it because we think that it will earn us brownie points in our walk of faith. In reality, our genuine and godly love for others stems from our becoming more like Jesus. It stems from our love for God and our faith in Him, which is only possible due to His ultimate love for us.

Indeed, we cannot really and truly love God and mature in our faith unless we also love one another. “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (1 John 4:19-21, NIV)

God’s love changes us. It makes us more empathetic and understanding of others. It helps us to give other saints in their walk with the Lord the benefit of the doubt. It helps us to overlook another person’s faults and to love them the way God loves them, with patience and gentleness and understanding.

That’s not to say that God’s love allows us to turn a blind eye to sin. We are most certainly supposed to hold our Christian family accountable when they are living unrepentantly or when they are doing damage to others in the Church. But it is to say, that God’s love helps us be more forgiving of those small annoyances that often come up between family members. It gives us the patience to bear with one another and encourage each other to pursue God’s holiness and righteousness in love and long-suffering.

You can’t say you love God but dislike His Church. You can’t say you love God but hate that person that you don’t think is deserving of His love. To do so is to prove that your understanding of the Lord and His desires is flawed. Just as it says in 1 John, how can you love an unseen God, yet hate His people who are seen and known? 

He has asked us to bear with and love one another. And when we see the evidence of that within the Church body, we are to rejoice over it. Not just in word, but in deed. Our love for one another is to be outward and evident by how we treat each other, not just by our platitudes and in our words. That is a Church that we can be at home in, glorifying the Lord together and making a place where He is pleased to dwell.