B Encouraged: 1John 4 Sees Christian Love Flourishing In Diversity (11/15/2021)

The breadth of God's call upon individual lives can easily create tension between brothers and sisters. But this is never God's design. Rather, in love, we are meant to be able to handle these tensions. We are not to be fragile nor prescriptively narrow. In the midst of each of us passionately stewarding individual call - we are not to denigrate one another - even if the stretch is awkward or, even, disconcerting. Rather, we are all in journey and it is the nature of love to trust the Spirit at work in one another, that we not prematurely condemn that which is, yet incomplete, but becoming in all of us. Loving in our diversity is costly love and it is in this act of love, that God's own love is made complete within us. This awkward, sacrificial commitment to love not only grows us daily further into the likeness of Christ - but beautifully bears witness to the world of the goodness of God.