#252 | The Love That Shapes Everything: Rediscovering the Great Commandment

We are not promoting a new strategy. This is not a new gospel. This has been here all along. But the reason it is so important is this.

The greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind and soul, and to love others. We can't love others if we do not see that they were created with.

Equal value before God.

He created every person with equal value. That is a starting point to loving them. And he loved us first before we loved Him. He loved us first and bestowed on us that deep intrinsic value.

It's part of our redemption. We can't skip it.

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry.

You've given your life to serve, but what happens when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, then tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging culture, you're not alone. I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollo's Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving testimonies of God's grace. I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians, and cultural thinkers as we seek to acknowledge, equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides. So grab your coffee and listen in, because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.

Welcome back to those who serve the Lord. I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming, and today we continue exploring the heart of my book, Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Because if we're going to live as citizens of God's kingdom today, if we hope to make any difference at all to bring restoration, reconciliation and hope to this fractured world, then we have to begin where Jesus tells us to begin. And that's love. The voice you heard at the beginning was the missionary Audrey Frank.

She's a missionary to the Muslim world, and she's reminding us that it's not about winning arguments. It's not about politics. It's not about anything else except loving people so much in order that they too may see and experience the love of God.

This is the great and first commandment. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love for God, love for people.

Not love as sentimentality, not love as strategy, but love as the very atmosphere of our lives. The Great Commandment is just the first step. It's the foundation for everything.

And yet, if we're being honest with ourselves, somewhere along the way, many of us have drifted. Today you're going to hear from some trusted voices as we wrestle with what it truly means to love God.

Not in the abstract, but to truly love him, and how to love others. In this modern world filled with distractions, divisions and distortions, loving God and loving others isn't just a task for you to complete.

It has to be the heartbeat of who we are as the people of God. And when we lose that heartbeat, everything else begins to falter.

Michael Hendricks, co author of the book the Other Half of Church, reminds us that Jesus cared deeply about about this. In fact, when Jesus addressed the churches in the Book of Revelation, he showed that losing our first love is not just a small problem.

It's a crisis at the very core of what it means to be his church.

Well, you know, you have to answer the question of what is the business of the church? And that's where we've gotten the answer wrong. You know, you look at Jesus.

The one time we see Jesus intentionally in kind of slowing down, analyzing the progress of seven churches is in Revelation, right?

Yep, yep.

Most of those churches were screwing up in doctrine and behavior, and he corrected them. You know, don't commit idolatry, don't do this, don't do that. One of the churches had lost its, its first love.

Interesting that there's no object for love. So it didn't say love for me or love for each other.

Because we know from John's Gospels that those two are so intrinsically intertwined you can't separate them. That's why I think Jesus just lays it at love. You lost your first love, and he didn't say, for me or for each other.

Now, the other churches maybe have doctrinal problems. You know, he tells them to repent, don't do this. But it's interesting.

The Ephesian church who lost their love, he said, you know, repent of that, otherwise I'm taking your lampstand away now. Never says that to any of the other churches. You know, one of the things Jesus said is let your light shine. Right?

One of the purposes of the church is to let your light shine. I believe if we Tie that in to what Jesus says to the Ephesian church in Revelation that light is our love intrinsically.

It's the love of God shining into our culture.

You know, when people think of Christians, they should think, you know, I don't agree with any other theology maybe, but man, do those people know how to love each other. And they know how to love me too. I just feel so loved when I'm with them now. Love's not the only thing too.

You know, there's other, you know, other churches were supposedly, we can assume that other churches were loving well, because Jesus, Jesus doesn't mention that. And he says, but you're doing these things, so correct this doctrine and correct this behavior and whatever, but if you've stopped loving, you stop.

Essentially you've stopped being a church. And if you start.

And Jesus is basically saying, if you keep acting like you're not a church for a while, I'm pretty sure I'm going to assure that you're not a church, because I'm going to take my lampstand away. And you know, and essentially he's saying, I don't want you shining my light. You know, the purpose of the church is to shine his light.

But he says to this church, I don't want if you don't repent, I don't want you shining my light anymore. Because my light is love. If you're not shining love, nothing else matters.

Michael just highlighted how central love is to the church's identity, that when we lose our first love, we lose the very light we're meant to shine in the world. But what does it really mean to return to that first love? I mean, and seriously, for many of us, the idea of love feels almost outdated.

We've heard it all before, like something we've heard too much without understanding its depth or power. James Choung, co author of Longing for Revival, points us back to the roots of that love, reminding us that it's not just about feelings or sentiment.

It's about rekindling a relationship with God that fuels genuine devotion and transforms how we interact with the world.

Have we lost our first love? I think that's. I keep wanting to go back to love. And that's such an old school word.

You don't even hear a lot of either talks or themes or people just talking about love because it feels so like, oh, God's love, God's love. Sure, sure, sure, right. It doesn't feel, I don't know, Herculean. There isn't like a sense of kind of vigor in It. But it's gotta be the ground.

And I just wonder.

We've chased after other loves potentially, like either political power or our vision of some other kinds of things, rather than falling back in love in this relationship with God. And that love fueling devotion, not white knuckling things, not like just trying to get our will engaged. But, man, that.

That sense that we had when we first met our spouses, that sense when we first. Not that we can always feel that level all the time, but there's got to be some moments in the relationship where you're like, you know what?

I just love her because I just love my wife. You know, there's a genuine affection that's there because you have a healthy relationship.

What would it mean for us as an American cherished, to return to a first love? And that's sort of why we need to recapture some of these things. It's more holistic. It's more fully orbed. It's word, deed and power.

It's kind of these pieces where instead of getting caught into these culture wars, maybe we can just show people that we're not against them. We're just in love with Jesus. And that just requires some other things. I think that's a missing piece right now.

James has challenged us to consider what it means to return to our first love. Not a superficial or fleeting affection, but a deep, transformative devotion that shapes how we live and engage with others.

But what happens when we fail to love? Well, when we get caught up in our own narratives and the rush of life turns us inward, it becomes harder to love sacrificially.

Ashley Hales, in her book A Spacious Life, beautifully picks up on this tension, showing us how love requires limits, focus and a willingness to see others as people, not as mere objects. In our story, like when you're hurrying, you're eventually using people as objects, like.

Where you're the hero of your story, it's the movie about your life, and everyone else is just like a bit part, right? And so when you can't actually love another person sacrificially if you're the main character, right, all the time, and everyone revolves around you.

But, you know, love always requires limits to be love, right?

I'm not married to, like all men.

Generally, I'm married to one particular man.

With particular desires and particular ways of being in the world.

Ashley Hales challenges us with the idea that when we're caught up in the rush of life and we're all busy, we can easily turn others into objects. That's Part of our problem right now, we unintentionally make ourselves the central character of the story.

This self centered way of living that we're all guilty of leaves little room for sacrificial love. True love, she reminds us, is marked by boundaries and particularity.

As we think about the importance of loving others in a sacrificial and relational way.

Jim Wilder takes this idea even further by emphasizing that at the heart of our identities is not just what we believe or what we do, but who we love.

His insights on the brain and the role of relationships in shaping our character are a compelling reminder of how deeply relational our faith truly is. Let's hear more from Jim Wilder, co author of the book the Other Half of Church.

Well, what it's hitting is that we're essentially relational beings. The, the number one characteristic of God that's been passed off to us as far as the brain is concerned, is it's relational.

It looks for a connection with somebody else with the intention that we would share life with them. And when we do it wrong, we're death giving to others. And when we do it right, we're life giving to others.

And it's the difference between wisdom and folly. All of those things come back to how am I relating to you?

And so the part of the brain that creates our identity and character and responses is all the relational circuits in the brain. Then we have the linguistic and analytical part of the brain.

And the problem with that is it's way downstream of all the things that give us our character.

So by the time you put beliefs and understanding in their truths, which are very useful to have by the way, but they don't really change our character very readily or very easily. It's a very, very slow process because traffic in the brain is one way, one directional traffic.

So if you put, on the other hand, well, let's put it this way, we're much more changed by who we love than what we believe. And so we're trying to move the Christianity back to where it was about a thousand years ago, which was primarily about our loves.

And so the love of God was more central than our understanding theologically of what he was like. Is he totally other? Is he not? We don't know. We love to God as we look for him in our daily lives, and we practice that with others.

If love is truly more formative than belief alone, then it forces us to rethink not just our personal discipleship, but the very foundations of how we do church. And that brings us to a deeper problem. A Problem that didn't happen overnight.

Jim explains how several powerful ideas, especially in the Western world, have shifted our faith away from love at the center and what it's going to take to recover it.

I think there's quite a difference globally to begin with, although the same kind of problems we're having are spreading around the globe at an amazing rate. So that said, the biggest problems in the Western church happened with four great ideas that sort of ruined the church.

So in the Enlightenment, we start with, I think, therefore I am. And so that raised thinking to the most important thing about humans. And what they meant by thinking was conscious, logical sort of thoughts.

And so the church thought, well, you know, if you want to think and you want logical thoughts, you want truth, we've got truth. So we then started making truth available to culture. The only problem is that at that point, truth began to eclipse love as the.

As our central message. We began arguing about truth, and then the volunteerists came along and he said, well, it doesn't matter what you believe if you can't make a choice.

So making the right choice became the sort of the central thing for the gospel. And so we made becoming a Christian, choosing Jesus as your savior and the solution to all problems. We're making better choices.

You hear that all around.

The church in the west don't hear that much in the Eastern church or a lot of other cultures, but we, you know, and of course we want to make good choices, but that doesn't make as big a difference as who we love. And after that, then came the will to power. What's the point in having having a will and making choices if you don't have the power to have it?

And so Nietzsche and all the power people came along and the Nazis and other people that wanted to implement that power. So. And Christianity, that went to power as well. You know, we're going to have powerful experience.

You know, you don't want a Christianity without power. So we began looking for whatever was a powerful thing.

And so the most common comment I hear about worship, wow, that was powerful, because that's, you know, the value we picked up. And of course, we don't want to have inert Christianity, right? But power is not as important as who you love.

And then when the truth and the right choices and the power of the spirit, all of those were failing to do things like prevent divorces and the rest of that, the church then went with culture in the direction of, well, if you're going to be loving, what that means is you're just going to Be tolerant of everybody. And so at this junction in culture, we have people being tolerant and defining love as being just accepting of everybody else.

And, you know, because there's really nothing you can do about the problems of the world anyway. Now, in the rest of the world, I think the operant condition is that they're surrounded by enemies of Christianity.

And when you're surrounded by enemies of Christianity, the only thing that really digs in and helps you is if you can spontaneously love your enemies and that practice, well, you know, the truth. Everyone could tell you, you should love your enemies. Knowing the truth hasn't made anyone that I know of love them.

Trying to make better choices, like I'm just gonna love them, you know, doesn't do it.

I mean, all those things don't work as a formula because the only thing that makes us love our enemies is when we love God and we see his love for our enemies as well. We share that love and go like, well, yeah, God loved me when I needed help. How can I not love the people that he loves?

And so that shared love, which is part of non Western cultures in communities, very often it just makes sense to them. This is what we do.

And if you're living that life of loving the people that God loves even before they love you back, you know, while they're still enemies. And I think God was that way before, while we were still his enemies, he loved us.

That is the thing that transforms people because they understand the relational context already. You know, if you become, if I love you, you will become one of my people.

And especially if I remember growing up in South America, as soon as someone became a Christian, they were part of the group trying to kill us, and they had to be taken into our group immediately and become one of our people if they were going to survive, because now their people were trying to kill them.

And so this sense that, you know, if we make this change of kingdoms, we must enter into relationship and share life together is really very prominent in the areas where Christianity is much more transforming than it is in the West.

At the core of it all, it's not about forcing ourselves to make the right choices or just willing ourselves into change. It's deeper than that.

As Jim continues, he shows how true transformation happens within a community that's shaped by love, where our identity is formed by the people we share life with.

And it runs on that things that if I could just make the right choices and make myself do it, it's, you know, which is not the thing that changes our character, you know, it's again going back to our identities formed by the people we love. And that would be what an identity group would be. People who love each other and bring out what Christ is trying to grow in one another.

Jim helps us see that real transformation flows from relational love, not just from better choices or tolerance or just happening by accident. It's about living out a love that mirrors God's love for us, even when we were still his enemies. This kind of love doesn't just happen in isolation.

It can't. It takes root in community. That's how God has made it to be.

Building on that idea, Michael Hendrix shows how the foundation of our identity in Christ, shaped within a group, actually becomes the engine that drives true love, not just personal achievement or numerical success.

The key is numbers should never motivate us. Oftentimes, it's like you hear the numbers touted. Last night, we had 2,000 people in the men's retreat.

We're starting to tread on some dangerous ground there when we start doing that, because the thing that motivates us, and this is a group identity statement where we are largely motivated by our love for each other, our love for God, and our desire to live out his kingdom on earth, Right? Those are the things that motivate us, the desires God has placed into our heart for our true identity.

Those are the things that are almost impossible to measure. So we really need to be very, very intentional about separating numbers from motivation.

It's easy to talk about love from the pulpit. I know, I've done it, too. We preach about loving God, loving one another, even loving our enemies.

But then Monday comes and the enemies don't seem to be so far away. But it's in an email from someone in your church, that deacon or elder that's causing you so many problems.

And sometimes, if we're being honest with ourselves, we see the guy down the street drawing these huge crowds, and we believe he's compromising. And then jealousy, discouragement creeps in. It's hard not to wonder if love really is enough. I get it. I live it, too.

But I still believe deep down that the way of Jesus is the way of love, not just preached, but practiced.

Michael Hendricks takes us deeper here, showing that what we need is not just better sermons about love, but a whole relational reformation where love moves from something we talk about to something we actually train for and live out together.

Well, you know, we're kind of at the head of the front edge of the wave on this thing since. And I can't.

I can't Say God told me this, but since that there's almost a new reformation coming to the church, but it's a real, it's a relational reformation where the church again returns to its roots, where love is the center of everything we do and everything else we do a bunch of other things other than just love, but everything is saturated by love and love is always the center of everything we do. We never do anything, our churches, that would decrease or separate or diffuse our love.

Love is always the center, but we go and do all sorts of stuff that God calls us to do, while always making sure we're centrally and fundamentally shining the light of Jesus's love in whatever we do. What that means though, is we need to teach people how to do this.

The problem is most churches have been preaching regular sermons that we're supposed to love each other, we're supposed to love God, even that we're supposed to love our enemies. But I have never been taught. Until the last five years, I'd never met anyone who said we need to train ourselves to love our enemies.

So they never said how. And it's almost cruel. It's like if I take my 9 year old daughter out into the garage and say, hey, you know that car has a bad carburetor.

Here's all my tools, go fix that carburetor and don't come back in until it's done. You know, that's kind of what we're doing to our people. We're saying, you need to love your enemies.

Okay, let's close in prayer and have another music song and then you go home. And nobody was ever told. Nobody and not just trained how, but actually given a chance to practice.

Okay, for the next 14 weeks, I was in a training with 25 people in my basement where for 14 weeks we trained through hypothetical situations to love our enemies.

If love is truly going to be the center of everything we do, it can't just be something we preach about. It has to be something formed deep within us.

And if I'm being honest, there have been times in my own life in ministry where I realized I knew the words, but I hadn't fully developed the maturity to live them out in the way that Jesus calls us to. Maybe you feel that too.

We've been trained to teach, to lead, even to grow ministries, but we haven't always been taught how to be deeply formed in love, especially when it gets hard. That's why what Michael shares next is so important.

He reminds us that maturity and love are deeply connected and sometimes real discipleship means letting Jesus take us back to the early places in our lives where growth was stunted and helping us to rebuild so we can love and lead more like him.

So for example, in the infant, the first four years, it's a maturity stage that we learn largely to receive the glowing face of our mothers and secondly our fathers. And then secondly, during that period we start to learn how to handle the big emotions of life, sadness.

And we learn that again by mirror neurons, by seeing my mother and seeing my father, attune to my anger, attune to my fear, return to my sadness and still be delighted to be with me, be in that sadness and show me what it looks like to be relational in that emotion. Those are the kinds of things we learn to give, to receive love. And then our brain actually kind of rewires itself after the infant stage.

Around age four, we go into the child stage. And one of the main skills we learn in the child stage is how to do hard things.

This is where the father's influence often is more prominent than in the infant stage. The mother's influence is prominent in the infant stage.

And in the child stage we learn to do hard things, hard relational things as well as hard physical things. It starts out with little things like learning to brush my teeth and make my bed or whatever. And it gets progressively harder throughout life.

But we learn that right, and we learn how to start to take care of ourselves. And then when we go and start into the like around age 12, 13, our brain rewires itself again for the adult stage. So adult stage starts at age 13.

And the big thing we're meant to learn relationally, mature wise, is not to take care of both myself and others. Like a child cannot do that, so we should never ask them to do that.

So like when a 10 year old kid has to take care of his drunk parent or something like that, we're actually doing some damage to their brain because they don't even have the circuitry to do that yet. That circuitry we get after age 12 or 13 or start to learn.

But adults can take care of others and ourselves simultaneously without destroying myself and destroying the other person.

So when we see a workaholic who just just absolutely works crazy hours because they want to get ahead and they start ignoring their family, that's an example of someone who didn't learn this, that this early they're still stuck in child level mature.

They haven't got into adult level maturity where they know how balance two really important things like a job and a family and making Both function simultaneously. That's an adult level skill. So a lot of people never workaholics, never, never learned how to do that.

So some of the focus in this whole brain Christianity, we talk about the other half of church in our book.

The other half of church takes maturity very seriously and makes sure that part of our discipleship is going back into the infant and child and adult stages and filling in the skill set. The skills we didn't get right. Those are the people that need to be leading.

Our small groups are the people that have done the hard work so that when someone comes in who's goth or someone drops a big bomb of some behavior issues or something, a mature leader, a man and a woman know how to handle these, maintain the relational integrity of the group, stay loving, not try to fix the person, but also be with them and get them true help.

This shift in focus toward hesed, this loving kindness and joy as central elements in the design of our churches is both profound and absolutely essential. As Michael Hendricks points out, attachment and relational dynamics are far more influential in shaping our character than beliefs alone.

This is actually what it was in the first century.

It's changed over time, especially as we learned last week when we started looking at a justification only salvation to get the person to pray the prayer to receive Jesus, and we didn't have it paired with sanctification, this communal part actually gets really lost. This insight really does have a deep implication for how we structure our worship and community life.

If we design our churches primarily to communicate content efficiently, packing people into rooms and quickly moving them in and out, then we actually risk overlooking the deeper needs of the heart that are foundational to spiritual formation.

When chesed and joy are placed at the center the way that God designed it to be, we're creating an environment where people are not just hearing truths, but also experiencing the relational warmth and grace that mirrors the very heart of God. It's more than just content delivery. It's about creating space for people to encounter God's love through the relationships in the community.

This approach aligns deeply with the process of maturity that Hendricks describes earlier, where we learn how to give and receive love, how to handle life's emotional complexities, and how to live out God's design for relational health and wholeness.

By making chesed and joy foundational, we allow the church to become a place where these relational and emotional maturities are cultivated, making it not just a place to receive information anymore, but a place to truly grow.

Very much so.

You know, Hesed, this attachment, it's the strongest driver in the human brain of forming our character more than any other thing, even more than our beliefs. Beliefs are very important.

You know, in a sense, we believe we need to redesign our churches with joy and hesitate at the center and in mind for everything we do. A lot of times those are an afterthought. We actually design the way we do church with something else in mind.

Oftentimes it's packing the greatest number of people into a room over a period of time so that we can get the content out to them, you know, and then move on, get the sardines out and a new class of sardines back in the room. And so we're saying, let's put our heads together.

We don't have answers to this yet, but let's put together what a hesed joy centered church might look like. And then we do still do some of these other things.

We still absolutely preach the truth of God's word and other stuff, but that we, we put what's first as far as God's design in our brain as first in what we do at church.

Michel Hendricks insight into how our brains respond to chesed and joy brings us back to a foundational truth within the church. Love is the core of our identity. The Great Commandment.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself speaks directly to the relational dynamics Hendricks describes. The emotional and relational wiring of our brains is not just an incidental detail.

It's a reflection of God's design for us to live in loving community. When Hendrik speaks of the brain's ability to process joy faster than conscious thought, he's pointing to something deeply theological.

Our capacity for love and relational connection is woven into the fabric of our being. The Great Commandment tells us that loving God and loving others is not merely a command, but the very foundation of who we are as God's people.

As Hendrix points out, joy and chesed open the door to transformational growth. But these elements alone must be framed within the larger story of God's love and our identity in Christ.

What makes this identity even more powerful is that it isn't just about receiving love. It's about becoming the kind of people who live out that love in the world, even when it's hard.

The call to love our enemies, which is central to the Great Commandment, is a radical demonstration of the love we've received from God. Hendricks focuses on group identity and that ties directly into this.

As the church, we are not just a group of individuals receiving Love, but a people with a shared identity that reflects the love of God. This identity shapes how we interact, how we love, and how we become the living embodiment of the great commandment.

When we are reminded regularly of who we are. People called to love God fully and love others sacrificially. We are forming a group that lives out the great commandment in tangible ways.

This is the church as a people who don't just hold beliefs about love. No. But embody the very essence of love in everything we do.

And it's in this relational context marked by joy, love and a shared identity, that true transformation can happen.

Yeah. You know, the thing we look at and all this part of the brain is faster than our conscious thoughts.

So it's something that we just instantly know and instantly long for. So this is kind of weird, but our right brain actually runs faster than conscious thought. It runs at the speed of joy. Left brain is more the.

It's more conscious, more. It's a slower, slower rate brain. And so you walk into, let's say, a typical church lobby.

You know, you're visiting, maybe you're wondering if you're going to go there and your brain every sixth of a second is looking, are these people happy to be here? Do I see them at least happy to be with each other? Maybe they don't know me yet. Do I sense a bond during the service? Do I hear weakness?

Do strong people share weakness, so to speak? Or is it just, here's my success, here's my great personality, here's the polished thing, and then you go home.

And also those two things, really the joy and the love are the things that just make stuff grow like crazy. Part of the problem though is those are not enough. They're absolutely necessary.

Without joy or chesed, you don't even get into the circuits of your brain that change character. Right. There's almost like a firewall there.

If you don't have a chesed, a agape, a love, a bond, like a family level bonding with people around you, then your church or anybody else doesn't get access to your character. Your brain will kind of dismiss it. But just because someone has access to your character doesn't mean you're going to grow good character.

You can also grow bad. You can grow like a garden. You can grow tomatoes and lettuce and carrots, but you can also grow lots and lots of weeds. Right?

So the third nutrient of soil that we add after joy and hesed, after love, we call it group identity, but really answers the question in Our brain, as well as answering this question in the control processor of who are my people and how do they act?

How do we act in this situation, any kind of situation, you find that your brain is trying to draw from your group identity to know how we act in this situation. An example of this example is probably easier, is Jesus said quite a few times in the New Testament that we're a people who love our enemies, right?

So that's not just what we do. It's actually who we are that we're actually identified. You know, he said people are not Christians. He called pagans. I'll love those who love them.

So, you know, that's great. We should love those who love us. But we are to love our enemies and actually exchange curses, blessings for curses. So this is who we are.

So my question is, are we saying that to each other? Like, are we reminding? Like, when.

When I start hating my enemy, do you walk up to me and say, you know, Michael, remember that we are a people who love our enemies and exchange curses for blessings? Because it seemed like you were wanting to curse back when someone cursed you. We're actually building our group identity. We're creating a people.

The church was always meant to be a people. It's a people that has a shared value of who we are and how we act and what we do in the world.

What Michel describes about building a community of joy, love, and shared identity echoes the deeper reality Jesus called us to in the great commandment. To love God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

True Christian life isn't just about right thinking or even right behavior. It's about becoming a people so shaped by love that it defines our very way of being in the world.

This connection between our loves and our life together is not new. In fact, it's deeply rooted in Christian history, especially here in the United States.

Historian George Marsden, one of the greatest living historians on Christianity in the United States, reminds us that after the revivals of the 18th century, the greatest theologian in American history, Jonathan Edwards, wrestled with this very same question. What does authentic Christianity look like? What are the real signs that the Spirit of God is. Is at work among his people?

And as Marsden explains, Edwards pointed right back to the orientation of our loves and ultimately to the kind of humble, sacrificial love that reflects the very heart of Christ.

In the wake of the revivals, he asked, what are the signs of authentic Christianity that we can look for, particularly in ourselves, but also in others? And he writes a book on peace and religious affections or religious loves. And the signs of true Christianity are where are your loves oriented?

And I think of it as if you have this central vision of Christ, the revelation of Christ at the center of reality. That's what creation is why God created and to reveal the love of of Christ.

Then that ought to be a kind of like a planet that holds your other loves, your lesser loves in or like the sun that holds you the other planets of your lesser loves in their right, right ordering of laws which comes from Augustine. What does it look like if a Christian's loves are rightly ordered? So he starts with love to God and expounds on what that involves.

And then he gets to one of the qualities of Christian person who's truly loving and humility. He quotes Augustine and John Calvin saying what are the essential traits of Christianity? He says humility. Humility. Humility.

It's like the builders location, location. Humility. Humility. Humility. That's.

That should be one of our central traits and one that I found particularly intriguing in light of a lot of discussion today is he emphasizes that the true Christian should have a lamb like dove like character like Jesus. And rather than emphasize he says some Christians think that you need to be manly, warlike but they're really mistaken.

And sort of translating those kinds of fierce qualities into the Christian character. And what you should be looking for the Christian character are childlike characteristics. You have to be like a little child to follow Christ.

And Christ is gentle and mild and we lose sight of that all too easily. And then Edwards goes on with other trade ends up longest part of his treatise is charity. Look for acts of charity.

What are people doing for other people? And that's really the best sign how much of your Christianity is self serving and how much is really serving others. And it can be very.

The challenging thing to keep thinking about how much of what you're doing is to make yourself secure and comfortable. And are you really reflecting the love of Christ and sacrificial love of Christ. That's a great challenge and a very difficult kind of thing.

But I think that's Edwards is right. That's the kind of thing to look for and that's the sort of thing that can give depth to anyone's Christianity.

I, I don't have a good idea how to solve the problems of all the problems of the church today. But those are good qualities. And you mentioned moralistic therapeutic deism. Yeah. A lot of people see Christianity as just sort of therapeutic.

What, what do I get out of it.

Edwards is saying it needs to be oriented towards these loves first, the love to God and then this rightly ordered secondary loves and get them in the right, right relationships. And then, then there'll be beauty in your own, your own Christianity.

And, and I think one goal for any local congregation is to say people are drawn to Christianity, often not by particular teachings or by arguments, but they say, oh, look at those people, and there's something they're doing that's, that's just right. And I'd like to be, I'd like to be part of a community like that.

That's much more important than do you teach this doctrine or this particular doctrine, but to develop a community that's known as a loving community. And that's the way people are very often convinced, convinced of things.

I mean, that's, that's the way, you know, we try to witness you try to be a winsome community.

I think sometimes that gets lost, particularly in, in some of the, you know, both the left and right political Christianity, you get, you know, ideological, ideological Christianity rather than, what shall I say, relational Christianity that's biblically grounded. And that's what Edwards. One of the things Edwards, I think, offers a guide to.

He doesn't have all the answers, but it's a good reminder that this is where the core should be and this is what a Christian and a Christian community should look like.

When we listen carefully to the voices we've heard today, Missionary Audrey Frank, missiologist James Choung, neurotheologian Jim Wilder, spiritual formation pastor Michel Hendricks, cultural critic Ashley Hales, and historian George Marsden, a strikingly unified picture begins to emerge. At the heart of the Christian life and ministry is not bigger platforms, flashier programs, or ideological battles.

It's the formation of a community deeply shaped by the love of God. A people who embody joy, humility, and sacrificial love. Audrey Frank reminded us that it goes back to basics to love God and to love people.

James Choung called us back to our first love, to have God renew us in our love for him and others. Jim Wilder showed us that transformation happens through relational joy, not through information alone.

We can't just walk will to love God and other people. No, it happens when people are being together and truly start to love one another.

Michel Hendricks continued to expand on this, and he emphasized that love and loyal relational bonds. This hesed is essential for any type of character change. We want to see building a shared group identity centered on loving even our enemies.

Ashley Hales reminded us that love is, is Restored, restrictive, but in a good way. It is knowing who God is and what he desires, and then loving the people we are with in the everyday.

And then George Marsden, the historian, reflecting on the life of Jonathan Edwards, pointed us back to rightly ordered loves. A life where humility, gentleness and sacrificial charity are the marks of authentic Christianity.

Loving God and loving people, the Great Commandment. That's what it is. Loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves isn't just a personal ethic.

It's the very soil in which a faithful church grows. If you're a pastor or ministry leader, the primary question you must ask is not how do I grow my church?

But rather, am I fostering community marked by joy, humility and sacrificial love? When we get the Great Commandment right, everything else starts falling into place.

Over the past few weeks, we've explored the crisis within the church today and God's blueprint to address it. We began with the Great Commission and moved on to the Great Commandment.

But there's still one more crucial element, the one that gets overlooked time and time again. The Great community. This is not optional in God's economy. This is the bridge between the first two, where love is not just taught, but lived out.

The Great Community is a visible testimony of Christ's reign, a people through whom unbelievers can see the reality of God's kingdom at work. And this is why we're launching a brand new exclusive ministry leader cohort centered around my book Blueprint Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

In this cohort, we'll go deeper into how to build thriving, Kingdom focused communities in today's complex cultural landscape. But here's the catch. This opportunity is only for a select group of leaders. I can't do everyone.

I'll take a few people that really want to grow and only those. And there's a cost involved. There are more details that'll be coming out. We'll bring that out next time.

And trust, trust me, this is something you are not going to want to miss. If you want to see real transformation. You're tired of going through the motions. You're tired of the status quo.

You want to see real change begin to happen in your people, Then this is for you.

And next week, join me as we explore the final great of God's blueprint, the Great Community, where we learn more about what this community is supposed to look like, how love is to be lived out in this community, and how a people are to be formed to visibly display the reality of Christ's reign. It's going to be a great time. I can't wait to see you there. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord.

A podcast of Apollo's watered the center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics. We trust that what you've heard has inspired and encouraged you in your walk of faith. Remember, serving the Lord isn't just about what we do.

It's about who we are becoming in Him. Whether in the small moments or the grand gestures, each step of service brings us closer to his heart.

If you found today's discussion meaningful, we invite you to share it with others who might be encouraged. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps spread the message to those who need to hear it most.

Until next time, may you continue to serve the Lord with joy, humility, and a heart full of his love. God bless you. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off. Stay watered, everybody.