As we read Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians, we may notice that he seems to have been more confident of them than they were of themselves. Yet, his confidence in them was not so much in them as it was in the Holy Spirit. Because of the Spirit, he had reason to have confidence in what the Spirit would do among, in, and through them. Along this same line, a teacher made the following comment about his experience in one of his classes: “On one occasion I was suffering from some agenda anxieties, afraid that the members of the class, in the course of their discussion, would not arrive at some important and necessary insights. I was tempted to make sure that they saw certain things in the subject that I felt they ought to see, but fortunately I was restrained from interfering. Instead, I had an exciting morning98 hearing all the things that I wanted to say said by them. It was a great experience! This illustrates how important it is for us to keep ourselves from meddling, and to have confidence in the Spirit. Then the truth appears in the midst of us much more powerfully than if we handed it out, because when it appears out of the midst, it comes with authority, it comes with depth, it is memorable. The truth that comes to us in this way makes us free. The moral is obvious: Let us trust what God is trying to accomplish in us, and therefore trust one another.”
To trust in the Spirit’s working through dialogue does not mean that we shall be successful in all our endeavors. People’s response to being trusted is not dependable or consistent. Man’s response to God’s trust, expressed in the life of Christ, produced the crucifixion. We all have had the experience of having our trust in others betrayed. This tempts us to become bitter, to lose faith in man, and to lose faith in God. But these responses are not a contradiction of trust; they are a part of the curriculum of trust. Trust, if it is to do its full work, must include mistrust, and faith must include doubt. I am helped to accept this insight because of the awareness of the doubt that is so much a part of my own faith which God accepts as a part of me and which gives my faith something to do. After all, faith is for doubt, courage is for anxiety, love is for hate. Instead of resenting hate, anxiety, doubt, and mistrust, we should accept them as a part of life.
We are called by the divine love to be lovers, called by God to be His servants, called by the Saving Person to be His person in the realm and the relationship of the personal. We are precious and important to one another and to God. We have a responsibility for others that must be met by our first being responsible for what we are in ourselves, the instrument for the revelation, in personal terms, of the power of love. It is imperative, therefore, that if we are to love others as we love God, we must love ourselves as being infinitely precious to God and ourselves, and indispensable because we have responded to a means of salvation for one another.
VI99
LOVE IN ACTION
“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us:
and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”—1 John 3:16
We come now to the climax of our study. Love must lay down its life; that is, it must give itself. The question then is: What is the mode and place of its self-giving? Under this heading I want to consider the nature of communication, evaluate the church as an agent of communication, and dwell on the implications of our study for church unity.
The Importance of Communication
Communication is essential to the expression of love and indeed to life itself. Where there is love, there must be communication, because love can never be passive and inactive. Love inevitably expresses itself and moves out toward others. When communication breaks down, love is blocked and its energy will turn to resentment and hostility. One of the greatest of tragedies occurs when the partners of a relationship break off their communication with each other. Without communication, the possibilities for a relationship become hopeless, the resources of the partners for the relationship are no longer available, the means for healing the hurts that previous communication may have caused are no longer present; and each, when he recovers from his need to justify himself and hurt the other, will find himself in a bottomless pit of loneliness from which he cannot be pulled except by the ropes of communication, which may or may not be capable of pulling him out again because of their weakened condition. Many of us know what it means to be in a foreign country where100 we cannot speak the language, but the loneliness of that condition is as nothing compared to the loneliness that is the product of an alienation that has been produced by either irresponsible use of the means of communication or a willful refusal to employ them.