Monday: Concord or Cantankerousness?
WEEK 21
MONDAY
CONCORD OR CANTANKEROUSNESS?
Psalm 133
We have been exploring the vast and penetrating unity that came into being with the coming of the Holy Spirit. I say “vast and penetrating” for it included every area of life: all ages, classes, races, and both sexes. This outcome from the impact of the Spirit is strangely different from the phenomena we see in movements today that stress the Spirit. Here we find diversion over minute points of doctrine, emphases, and names. The spiritual climate is quite different. Here we find criticism and cantankerousness; there we find all-embracing concern and concord. Of modern movements stressing the Holy Spirit—with some exceptions—it can be said as was said of the church at Ephesus: “I know your works, your labor, and your endurance. I also know that you don’t put up with those who are evil. . . . But I have this against you: you have let go of the love you had at first” (Rev 2:2-4). The Spirit was not manifest as the Spirit of love—as in the Acts, “at first”—therefore modern movements dissipate their energies showing their inability to bear with those who differ from them in the slightest, hence are not producing the first fruit of the Spirit, which is love. They are whirling eddies instead of a mighty stream of redemption following through the total life of the church and surrounding society.
We have seen the fellowship of the Spirit, the koinonia, manifested in Jerusalem; and then we have seen that same koinonia transplanted to an environment, Antioch, where it became incarnate in a church. Out of that koinonia as the soul, the body—the church—was formed. That body became the body of Christ, so much so that a name was given to this group—Christians—for the Spirit of Christ had taken flesh and blood and was incarnated in a society.
We use glibly the statement that the church is the body of Christ. It is if at the center of that church is the koinonia, the fellowship of the Spirit. If that is absent, then the church is a religious organization, not a Christian organism. It has a form of life, but in fact it is dead.
O Lord, help us to know and realize and incarnate the Holy Spirit in our churches. May love from within be organized into all we do in the without. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Love shall be the organizing principle of my life today, love for everything and everybody.