Growing in Faith, Hope, and Love as a Community
You open up your Bible daily. You read it faithfully. You seek to understand and apply it to your heart and to the circumstances of your life. But is there something you're missing?
One of the major blessings of our time is the easy accessibility of the Bible. We can have a physical or digital copy of God’s Word in front of us in seconds. In my small slice of the Protestant world, we emphasize the personal reading of Scripture, highlighting the importance of personal devotion in forming our hearts to love God and love our neighbor. This is vital to the work of sanctification. To grow in godliness, we need to be in the Word of God.
But there is something vital in Scripture that we often miss.
READING THE BIBLE THROUGH INDIVIDUALIST EYES
It’s something we miss because many of us tend to read the Bible simply as a book for us as individuals. But the bulk of Scripture was written to a community. It was written for the gathered people of God to hear, worship, and respond to in their everyday lives. At least nine of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament were addressed specifically to a church community.
“We walk by faith well when we walk by faith together.”
We lose something when we read the commands found in these letters as simply individual commands. They are written for us, yes, but also for the community as a whole to grow in godliness and to live out the call to be faithful as the body of Christ in the world.
We could look to almost any letter of Paul’s and think through what it means to read it as a community, but I want to focus on three specific commands of his. He continually calls the church to be marked by faith, hope, and love (1 Cor. 13:13).
What does it mean to live with faith, hope, and love not just as an individual, but as a community?
COMMUNAL FAITH
Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. It is a personal salvation, a personal transformation. You are not saved by being a part of a community, but you are saved into a community. As followers of Jesus, we are part of the family of Jesus. We are part of the church, the fellowship of believers gathered locally.
To walk by faith, we need the church. When Paul calls us to put on the helmet of salvation and to trust God in every moment of our lives, he is writing to a community of believers gathered together to hear his words. We walk by faith well when we walk by faith together.
“Church isn’t an activity we do. It is who we are.”
Sometimes our faith will be lacking and we will need the encouragement and belief of others to hold us up, help us take the next step, or believe for us when we may doubt. A vibrant church is one whose members realize they are not just individuals who gather on Sunday, each bringing their own isolated portion of faith. Rather, they are family connected eternally to one another, all following the same Savior, saved by the same grace, and walking in the same faith.
Faith is more communal than we might think. We grow in faith together when we sing songs of praise, when we hear the Word proclaimed, and when we encourage and equip one another to walk through the ups and downs of life. Church isn’t an activity we do. It is who we are.
Therefore faith isn’t just an individual act, it is communal. It is in this community that we find the strength to keep believing and to keep walking by faith. When Paul calls us to faith, he is calling us to faith as a community, as individuals who now belong to the body of Christ.
COMMUNAL HOPE
Paul also calls the church to live in hope. He is specifically calling the church to the hope we have in Jesus Christ—the hope of the gospel. The hope based on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The hope of the forgiveness of our sin and of eternal life. This gospel hope is not just an individual hope; it is a communal hope.
“Our hope is resurrection life lived in the company of all the saints.”
Read the promises of the new heavens and the new earth. They are communal promises. Our hope is that we will live among the people of God from every generation and from every tribe, tongue, and nation. One day we will all worship the Lamb who was slain and live in the unfiltered glory of God. All things will be made new, and this redemption and restoration will be experienced in the community of the eternal church. Our hope is resurrection life lived in the company of all the saints.
The call to endure with this hope is also a communal call. Our hope is a communal hope, and therefore we need the church to help us endure by reminding us of this hope and embodying this hope for us in our moments of suffering, loss, and grief. We are in this together and we need one another.
COMMUNAL LOVE
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love,” Paul informs us (1 Cor. 13:13). Jesus tells us that the commands of God basically boil down to two things: to love God and to love our neighbor. This command to love is also a communal command because we live out the command to love within the church.
Jesus says in John 13:35, “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The way we love the church shows the world that we know Jesus. Obeying the command means showing tangible love to the church and to the world around us as the church in the world.
The church must obey this command and together must tangibly love its community, its enemies, and all people made in God’s image to the ends of the earth. We must think through how to love as God has called us to love as a community of faith placed in a specific location at this specific time. We must call one another to live this life of love individually, but we also must consider how we can live this life of love communally.
GROWING TOGETHER
So much of the Bible was written to be read and applied to the gathered people of God. In order to be faithful Bible readers, we must do the hard work of trying to untie ourselves from exclusively reading the Word as individuals.
As we relearn how to hear, read, and apply God’s Word communally, we will become a community that is continually growing in faith, hope, and love together.
Zac Harrel serves as Network Missionary for the Heart of Texas Baptist Network. He is husband to Shandra and daddy to Evahlyn and Jameson. You can find him on Twitter (@ZHarrel).