GodReflection: Lonely? —glad you are here, you are family.
Luke shares with us advise from Jesus that we may have read and heard so often that we overlook it or fail to see its implication. Let’s listen closely again to Jesus’s words: Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Luke 6:38).
It occurs to me that this lesson from Jesus uses the church family to solve our loneliness. What if from the first we begin with a larger vision of our church family? Let’s think globally.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to set our own perimeters when we talk about our love for the church? I may be dead wrong, but my perception is that church is viewed primarily as a local assembly with only a nod to its global nature.
When I limit my vision to a local church, I fail to see the body of Christ is so much more. As I love the family of God close to me, I need to take care to not miss the expansive nature of family that covers the entire globe. I must be careful not to overlook its overarching purity and perfection made so through the spilled blood of Jesus.
Christ’s church is so grand I cannot exhaust its depths. It stands with God, Jesus, Spirit, Faith, and Scripture as a holy gift that continues to gush blessings beyond my human capacity to absorb. As we open our minds and our arms to the largeness of God’s church, we begin to realize that we can give love to multi-millions of brothers and sisters around the world. We are not alone.
In richness the church rises day after day and night after night to serve as God’s leaven in a broken world. Through the church the hands of Jesus heal, care and forgive in countless 
neighborhoods across the lands of the earth. The church family gives and receives Christ’s goodness.
Daily, thirsty people expand the church by numbers that I cannot grasp. From multiple languages and cultures, they submit to the Lordship and Kingship of God’s Son. For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another (1 John 3:11).
I need to train my heart to love the millions of God’s children who I will never meet on the path of my earth-walk. I love them by my love for Jesus’ church.
Closer to home I want to learn at a deeper level to love the church that meets under the lordship of 
Jesus in church tribes that differ from my own. I want to love those with whom I disagree.
Just as Jesus accepts me based on my heart and my allegiance despite the fact I do not always think right, I need to extend the same grace to all believers who share in the body of Christ. Only Jesus has authority to issue membership in his church. As I extend grace, I learn better to love the church. I help stamp out loneliness in others and discover loneliness disappears from my own life.
I read Paul’s description of the intensity of Jesus’ love for his church:
. . . Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless (Ephesians 5:25-27).
Perhaps that gives us insight into how we, as fallen creatures, can love the church. The more we can see the church through the eyes of Jesus, the more readily we will offer grace to our cultural differences and to all our human missteps in being church.
To stay with Paul’s body analogy of church, we begin to perceive the body parts as made holy, stain free, and perfect as each part is washed through Jesus The Word. It’s a heart transformation concept. Through Jesus we can see and love the church as perfect.
I can’t help but think of the elderly apostle John who most likely in his nineties, reflects on his Lord and the church as he writes:
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. . . We love because he first loved us. . . And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. . . Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well (1 John 4&5).
He speaks of the church. When I make my feeble attempts to love Jesus’s whole church in the spirit of the apostle, I catch a glimpse of the face of God. He looks at me and smiles.
Stay tuned.
Gary J. Sorrells
A GodReflection on Lonely? —He Swells with Holy Pride When We Love Everyone in Our Family.
God Reflection 