Jesus taught his disciples that we are to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). As Christians genuinely love one another, the observing world will know that we are truly Christ’s disciples – that we are Christians.

In 1 Peter 1:22 it says that Christians are to love one another “deeply, from the heart”. In our romanticised thinking about love, we can lose some of the impact of what it means to love ‘deeply’. The word for ‘deeply’ here means something like ‘at full stretch’. We might say ‘love each other with the pedal to the metal’, or ‘with the power turned all the way up to full’. It’s a practical word. It’s not just talking about having deep feelings towards the other members of our congregation. It’s about how we actually show that love to each other. It’s about diving to the depths of our ability to practically love one another and giving it all we've got.

I take it that this is something that we need to keep working at – otherwise Peter wouldn't feel the need to tell us to do it. Loving each other at full stretch needs attention, effort and determination. Loving each other at full stretch means sacrifice. That means that loving the other members of our congregation will cost us – it will cost us time, emotional and physical energy, money, whatever it takes. To love each other at full stretch means wanting to invest ourselves in the lives of the other people at church. At the very least that means getting to know each other. 

Every one of us can identify someone else in our own congregation who we either don’t know at all or know very little about. Out of habit we gravitate to the people we know already. Show someone else you love them by breaking that habit and investing yourself in loving them just by starting to get to know them this weekend.

The kind of love we should love each other with doesn't hold back. We don’t love each other at ‘minimum’ or even ‘medium’. We need to keep working at loving each other at full stretch. The model of that kind of love is the way that Jesus has loved us. Reflect this week on what level you’re loving the others in your congregation at.

In Christ’s love,


Paul

One of the first things that strikes you as you begin reading 1 Peter is that it doesn't try to disguise the hardships that come as part and parcel of being a Christian, as if the Christian life should be all ‘beer and skittles’ and we mustn't be doing it right if it isn't. 

Instead Peter writes to encourage us that while we live in this world, suffering, trials and rejection by the world for being a Christian is all part of God’s grace to those he has chosen and called to be his forever. When we suffer grief in all kinds of trials because we are Christians, it isn't because God isn't in control – it’s because he is in control, and is preparing us for the perfect eternal future that we will certainly inherit when this world is no more. 

It’s no wonder that we read that we are strangers to this world – we are in it but not of it. This world – the world that doesn't know the true God – should not feel like home to a Christian. People won’t understand why we won’t fall in with what the world thinks is okay. We’ll feel on the outer – like a stranger. That’s okay! That’s God’s grace to us. This world is not our home. It shouldn't feel like it is. 

Let’s encourage one another as we share our lives to be bold in standing firm in this grace of God, and not caving in to the world so that we fit in.

In Christ’s love,

Paul