What was the whole point of revelation?
“Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:36-40 MKJV)
What was the crux of the Law of Moses? Glorify Jehovah as your feudal master, and treat His family as holy. Not holy in a servile sense, but with yourself as one of them, sanctify His reputation by how you can sacrifice some portion of your personal prerogatives to maintain peace and stability in the family of faith.
As always, the church doesn’t have to accomplish a darned thing, as the world views accomplishment. The whole point is to coexist in some measure of harmony sufficient for His glory to shine. This is your true life support. When you love your covenant brother and sister as much as you love yourself, you’ll seek a balance point where you aren’t sacrificing too much and losing your grip on your calling and mission, but you are sacrificing enough to meet them where they are, and to aid them in their mission and calling.
But the whole of our witness in this context is cooperative coexistence as a family built on sacrificial love (agape). That’s how His glory shines. It’s not a static stability of sterility and death, but a dynamic and living peace that grows and changes with all our individual growth and changes. Every incidence of two or three believers together constitutes at the least a provisional covenant family for as long as those two or three are together in the flesh (Matthew 18:20).
But that you, speaking the truth in love, may in all things grow up to Him who is the Head, even Christ; from whom the whole body, fitted together and compacted by that which every joint supplies, according to the effectual working in the measure of each part, producing the growth of the body to the edifying of itself in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16 MKJV)
We as a virtual parish are no different; this is no objective at which we stop. If we happen to make the world a better place to live, that’s a side effect, not our aim. We owe nothing to this world; it has no claim on us. What makes life worth living for us includes pulling back from this world with its lies. Whatever debt or obligation we owe is bound up wholly in our Savior.
Everything else is merely a matter of tactics in keep the family harmonious, stable and strong together.
Addenda: The Law of God is its own reward. You will know you have arrived when you stop looking for a destination.
