I think the opportunity of loving your neighbor, loving a friend, loving a stranger is all around us every single day. And we just have to become more aware of it. Listen, I understand there are plenty of opportunities to tell someone what you don’t like. What you don’t like about them, what you don’t like about the world, what you don’t like about situations.
None of that represents Jesus well. What represents Jesus well is when you are willing to have a conversation with someone who may be different from you, who may think differently than you. And I know that in our culture, we really value standing up for issues, standing up for things, that’s good. I think it’s very important that we also learn how to take a seat.
Jesus sat at a lot of tables with a lot of different people, and He never changed who He was. He never compromised His holiness. He never compromised His commitment to His convictions. But somehow people always got up from those places changed. The Scripture says it’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. I don’t know why believers would try to use anything else.
So let’s use kindness. Let’s use the truth in love of Jesus. And I’m going to throw this in here as a bonus. The only time we find Jesus standing up, the Scripture says, was when Thomas was being martyred. He saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Everywhere else in Scripture, you see that Jesus is seated at the right hand.
But it was when someone was broken, being persecuted, being beat down, pushed to the fringes, and told they don’t belong that Jesus stood up. Maybe that’s when we need to take a stand as well.