GOD'S CHURCH IS ONE AND GOD IS LOVE
by Reverend Father David A. Lee
inspired by Charles Gore and John Calvin - 2 of God's children
The true Church of God on this earth has no mission of its own. All we can have by ourselves is a club or a debating society; and our only hope, left to ourselves, is to win as many members for our own club and away from other clubs as we can. And whatever this is, it is not the Mission. God's Mission belongs to God.
We must habitually remember how it must offends God to see divisions in His people, nations nominally God fearing, armed to the teeth against one another, class against class and individual against individual in fierce and relentless competition, jealousies among clergy and church-workers, communicants who forget that the sacrament of union with God is the sacrament of union with their fellow men?
I believe God's people are to be the makers of world peace. Something we can all do is to reconcile individuals, families, classes, churches, nations. The question is, "Are we, as churchmen and citizens, by work and by prayer, in our private conduct and our public action, doing our utmost with deliberate, unsparing effort?" If so, our benediction is of the highest: it is to be, and to be acknowledged as being, Sons of God.
The Mission was His from the beginning; it is His; it will always be His. He has His purposes from the foundation of the world, and the means to fulfill them; and the only part the Church has in this is obedience -- a share in the eternal and life-giving obedience of the Son of God... And the most terrible judgment on the Church comes when God leaves us to our own devices because He is tired of waiting for our obedience -- leaves us to be the domestic chaplains to a comfortable secular world -- and goes Himself into the wilderness of human need and injustice and pain. This judgment does come on churches and nations, when they forget that God is in command, that He does the choosing.
We shall benefit very much from the love that God wants to bestow on us if this thought has been impressed and engraved upon our minds that none of God's children should be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any way offended by us, without [our] injuring, despising, and abusing God and the memory of His Son, Jesus Christ by the wrongs we do.
We cannot disagree with our brethren's heartfelt attempt at worshiping God and professing God's love to others as he see's it, without at the same time disagreeing with God and what He stands for, or that we cannot love God without loving Him in the brethren; that we ought to take the same care of our brethren's bodies as we take of our own; for they are members of our body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any feeling of pain which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not to allow a brother to be affected by any evil, without being touched with compassion for him.
