Assuming the Best of Fellow Christians
From TABLETALK
The mark of a truly converted man is the fruit of the Spirit that is love (Gal. 5:22). Love for the brethren was Christ’s new commandment (John 13:34–35). After Jonathan Edwards saw a spiritual awakening of his congregation in 1734–35, he preached a sixteen-sermon series on 1 Corinthians 13:1–8 titled “Charity and Its Fruits.” Edwards did this because he was deeply concerned, as a pastor, to lead his congregation to Christian maturity, and so he repeatedly stressed that love among believers is the primary evidence of conversion. Edwards was pastorally wise to preach 1 Corinthians 13, since this powerful text is the clearest guideline on how to love other believers. In verses 4–8, Paul gives an exhaustive listing of the characteristics of true Christian love in the church (that is the context). How should I believe all things (about my fellow believers) and hope all things (about my fellow believers)?
Love believes all things. The way of the world is to believe the worst about others and to project nefarious motives on their actions. But Christian love is always ready to assume the best about people’s lives and words.
Love is not pessimistic or cynical but instead believes that God is at work in the lives of other believers. Christian love believes that God is progressively sanctifying them, making them holy. So the Christian must believe that his fellow disciple is driven by good motives and intends no harm. The Christian will not believe the contrary except on irrefutable evidence. Christian love chooses to pay attention to someone’s virtues and strengths, rather than the person’s weaknesses and annoying traits.
The difficulty here is how to harmonize this truth with texts that encourage us to be wary, to test all things, to exercise discernment. Thus, to assume the best about other Christians cannot mean that the Christian man who loves is a man of foolish gullibility. Still, while the believer does not ignore sin, he must choose to cover offenses (1 Peter 4:8). When a brother in Christ has sinned against us and asks for forgiveness (which entails a commitment to not sin in the same way again), we must love him by believing that he will (in the future) treat us rightly.
By forgiving him, we are saying, “Because I love you, I believe that you will not sin against me in that way in the future.” And the believer continues to respond this way seventy-seven times
Christian love is never pessimistic about fellow believers but is fundamentally optimistic.
The person who always thinks the worst of other Christians, who reads evil into the most innocent of actions, who questions motives, who refuses to give the benefit of the doubt is like the scribes and Pharisees. You’ll remember that they always believed the worst of Jesus. When Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners (Luke 5), they accused Him of sin. When Jesus healed a mute man and cast demons out of him (ch. 11), they accused Him of demonic possession. Job’s counselors were guilty of the same thing. They were absolutely certain that he was suffering because he was guilty of some heinous, hidden sin (Job 4). But by the end of the book (ch. 42), God had rebuked these “friends” for their false assumptions.
Love hopes all things. The world looks for the downfall of others and assumes that they cannot survive difficulties. The stance of the mature Christian, however, is not one of gleefully waiting for another believer to fail or for the same fallen believer to fall again. Believers have a deep desire for their fellow Christians to succeed, persevere, bear fruit, and mature. Thus, there’s a time orientation to Paul’s statements concerning love. “Believes all things” looks at the present, while “hopes all things” looks to the future. The Greek word translated as “hope” is elpizō, which means “to trust or expect.” Christian hope is based on the sure word of God’s promise. So when the Christian “hopes all things,” he is trusting that God is at work in the life of fellow believers just as God has said that He is (Phil. 1:6). To hope all things is the confident, trusting expectation of the long-term spiritual growth of fellow Christians. To hope all things means that we can never write off a fellow believer as a lost cause. Even when other believers fall hard, the Christian believes that God can and will restore them. (After all, don’t we see Jesus restoring Peter and encouraging Thomas after they have failed and disappointed Him?)
When we consider other believers, we should always look ahead to what they will be when God has brought to completion their likeness to the image of Christ on the last day. Whenever we don’t “hope all things” about fellow Christians, we shortchange God’s long-term work of purifying His elect and His commitment to finishing the good work He started in them. Thus, failure to hope all things is unbelief. It is a refusal to believe God’s Word that He will bring His work of grace in the life of other Christians to completion.
Ultimately, the reason that the believer is hopeful about other Christians is not because we trust them in and of themselves. It is because we trust the One who indwells them. We firmly believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in the life of our fellow believer. Christian love, then, is never pessimistic about fellow believers but is fundamentally optimistic, hoping that they (by God’s sanctifying grace) will outgrow all their pettiness and sin and bear fruit thirty-, sixty-, and a hundredfold.
Really, how could we ever be hopeless about other Christians when we are followers of “the God of hope” who has granted to all His children His sanctifying Holy Spirit (Rom. 15:13; 1 Thess. 4:8)?
Rev. Carl D. Robbins is senior pastor of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church in Simpsonville, S.C.
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