Simply Doing What We Know

In the beginning, Christianity was a very simple faith.  But over the centuries Christians have made it unnecessarily complicated.  This complexity grew out of a predictable pattern. 

In the first two or three centuries, the church found it necessary to argue against false teaching to preserve the core ideas of the faith.  These core ideas found their way into expressions such as the Apostle’s Creed.  But rather than accepting some things as mystery, the church would attempt to fill the vacuum of understanding through explanation that would become church “tradition”.  Tradition would become doctrine. But, whenever the church would deviate, the Lord would be faithful to raise up others to challenge its trajectory and shift our attention back to Him. 

This cycle has continued for centuries.  The by-product of this churn has been a complicated web of theology that’s almost impossible to disentangle.  The result is an emphasis on orthodoxy (correct beliefs) over the orthopraxis (correct practice) that the Lord is ultimately after. 

Don’t get me wrong.  What we believe about the Lord is important.  But not everything we believe about the Lord is of equal weight (or even necessary). Contemporary issues such as eschatology, sovereignty vs. free will, spiritual cessationism, women in leadership, the institution of marriage, or political theory drain our spiritual bandwidth have shifted away from where our spirits should be centered. They’ve become a distraction to Christ and the much more important work of embodying, demonstrating, and proclaiming the Kingdom of God.

As I’ve said in previous posts, the Lord is monumentally disinterested in filling our mind with theological constructs. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, makes this point as well.

“As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”

1 Timothy 1:3-4 (ESV)

Again, the “doctrine” that Paul taught was profound, but it wasn’t complex.  Paul was instructing Timothy to keep others in the church from adding to the foundation he had laid out. Stewardship of Christ is always to “go deeper” into the foundation (never to add something altogether different).  But today, because of our theological distractions, Christianity floats in a sea of speculation.

Like many today, I used to believe that we first need to get every believer aligned in their theology. Only after everyone has theological agreement could we begin the work of pursuing the Kingdom together.  Today, I realize that’s a fool’s errand. 

The theological ships have sailed.

Look, I get it. There are a lot of people out there with incorrect ideas about theology both critical and elective. But rather than spending the bulk of our collective energy in fixing faulty thinking and trying to unify people around theological details that might lead to proper Christian practice, maybe we should instead focus on practicing the Lord’s work that he’s been absolutely clear about from the beginning.

Maybe we should just do what we know.

There’s probably no command clearer, more emphatic, or more central to the Lord than to practice loving Him, loving each other, and loving those around us.

“…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:34-40 (ESV)

In fact, Paul was explicit about how a lack of love rendered all the other things useless.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (ESV)

Have you been gifted with the miraculous?  Do you have a deep understanding of God?  Does your faith move mountains?  Do you give all your money away to the poor?  Do you look forward to the day you will be martyred for our King?

None of that matters if we aren’t exercising love.

Love is central to Christ’s message. It’s something we know to do. There’s no mystery.  No need for a deeper understanding or alternative interpretation.  If we had nothing else of scripture and theology except the Lord’s command to love, we would still have enough to practice for the rest of our lives.  Not only that, but we would be doing the one thing the Lord has ever asked of us.  We would be participating what the world is so desperate to see, particularly between believers (John 13:35).

So, let’s try something different.

Pick a day on your calendar.  On that day, put down your Bible and hang up your rosary.  Leave Lewis and Chesterton on the table. Hit pause on your Beth Moore and John Piper podcasts.  Take a break from Facebook and the news.  Simply dedicate that day to letting the Lord lead you into acts of love of God and others.

In Re-examining Love, we defined love as:

A divinely supplied, unconditional act of the will that seeks to elevate others by demonstrating God’s affection for them through personal sacrifice.

Love is not mere sentiment.  It’s not a service project we do to check a block.  It costs us our time, our resources, and our pride. Love will make us vulnerable as we put others before us. A legitimate act of love never returns void. Both the giver and the recipient will be elevated.

Acts of love might be premeditated or spontaneous, passive or direct, big or small.  They might be directed toward those you know or toward complete strangers. They involve our actions as well as our reactions.  They can be demonstrated alone or as a group. They may be flawless, or we may stumble awkwardly into them.  Don’t worry about the “how”. Just be open to where the Lord leads in your expression of His love. Hopefully our one day of intentional focus would turn into regular habit. (As love is also addictive.)

Competing theologies seek to define and restrict Him. They cast a veil of mystery and complexity around Him.

But love seeks to express Him. In love, He is clearly seen.