June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 172 – 21 June
The bond that holds us together
Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. (Colossians 3:14, NASB)
Suppose a church does everything this week’s reflections have described, and does it well. The people genuinely share one another’s heavy loads. They turn up for the grieving and the frightened. They make generous allowance for each other’s rough edges, and they forgive real wrongs without keeping score. By every visible measure it is a model community, ticking each box a healthy fellowship is supposed to tick. And yet it would be entirely possible to do all of that with a heart of stone, performing each kindness as a cold duty, going through the motions of care while feeling almost nothing for the people on the receiving end. Paul knew this danger intimately, which is why, having listed a whole wardrobe of community virtues, he reached for one thing more and set it high above them all, the single quality that turns correct behaviour into something warm and alive.
The word above all the others
The crowning word is ἀγάπη (agapē, meaning self-giving love), and Paul placed it deliberately over the whole list that came before, as the garment to be pulled on above all the rest. Then he described its peculiar work with a second, striking word, naming love the σύνδεσμος (syndesmos, meaning the bond or ligament that binds things together). The image he chose is a remarkable one. A σύνδεσμος (syndesmos, meaning a binding band) was the sinew that held a body’s parts in their place, the connective tissue lacing bone to bone so that a collection of separate pieces could move and work as one. Love, Paul was saying, performs precisely that office among people. It is the living tissue binding the many different members into a single body, the thing that holds compassion and patience and forgiveness together and keeps them from flying apart into so many disconnected good deeds. Strip the love away, and all the other virtues remain technically present yet somehow lifeless, a heap of excellent parts with nothing to join them. Weave the love back through, and those same parts knit into one warm, working whole.
The tissue nobody notices
It repays a moment to consider how thoroughly we overlook this binding tissue in an actual body. Nobody admires their ligaments. We celebrate strong muscles and clever hands and bright eyes, while the sinews that hold the whole frame together go entirely unnoticed, recognised only on the dreadful day one of them tears and a knee or a shoulder suddenly buckles beneath us. Yet without that unglamorous connective tissue, the most magnificent assembly of bones and muscles would simply collapse into a heap on the floor, a pile of capable parts with no way to act as one. Love works in just this hidden, holding fashion. It seldom draws attention to itself, and a community knit together by real affection rarely stops to marvel at the thing doing the binding, until the love fails somewhere and a friendship or a fellowship audibly cracks. The binding only becomes visible in its absence, which is exactly why it deserves our deliberate care while it holds.
Where the whole week comes to rest
This is the note on which the whole week comes finally to rest. To be partakers together was never going to be a matter of mechanics, of sharing loads and forbearing faults and forgiving wrongs as so many items ticked off a checklist. Beneath every one of those acts must run the warm current of love, or the body has no real life in it. Love is what turns a dutiful favour into a heartfelt kindness, a tolerated neighbour into a treasured friend, a managed congregation into a family. And here, in the end, is where living for the gospel’s sake has been steadily leading all month long. A people bound together by love of this kind become a living argument for the very message they carry, since the watching world, looking on at the holding tissue between them, catches a glimpse of the One who first loved them all. Put on that love today, over everything else you are wearing, and let it hold your life, and your fellowship, beautifully together.
Declaration
More than any single good quality, I want love to be the thread running through all the rest of them. I can share a burden, speak an encouragement, make allowance for a fault, or forgive a wrong, and yet I know that without love beneath them these turn into hollow gestures, correct on the surface and cold underneath. So I ask love to be the binding of everything I do, the unseen tissue that turns a set of dutiful actions into a living, breathing kindness. Love is what ties me to the people around me and holds us together as something far stronger than any of us alone. Today I put love on over all the rest, like the one garment that keeps every other in place, and I let it bind my scattered efforts, and my scattered fellows, into one.
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