Which leads to another reason this is happening:
We’ve stopped seeing it as sin.
Whether in blogs or chat rooms, on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, we spew out the most caustic, mean-spirited words, actions and attitudes as if they are not reprehensible before heaven. But they are. According to Jesus, and throughout the New Testament, this is likened to second-degree murder (Matthew 5:21-22; James 3:5-10).
The one thing we must not do as followers of Christ is to give ourselves over to partisan bickering in such a way that we put party before faith. We are not primarily Republicans or Democrats. We are first and foremost followers of Christ. And as followers of Christ, we should bear the mark of our Savior.
And the mark of the Christian is love. That means we see our brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of party or position, as our brothers and sisters in Christ. And the way we should interact and engage should be the way a healthy, loving, functional family should interact and engage.
One of the stories that surfaced surrounding the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was her deep friendship with another Supreme Court Justice who died before she did—Antonin Scalia. You could not imagine two people further apart politically. Yet the icon of the left and the icon of the right were extremely close.
They went to the opera together.
Their families spent New Year’s Eve together.
And while vacationing with their families, they even rode elephants in India together.
A little-known story is that once Scalia bought Ginsburg two dozen roses for her birthday. One of his clerks, knowing how divided they were on countless court cases, and how she had never given him a vote he needed on a 5-4 decision of any significance, asked him why he did it. Scalia simply said, “Some things are more important than votes.”
Yes, they are.
To reclaim the relational unity that we are called to demonstrate before a watching world, we need to have an underlying trust of our brothers and sisters in Christ. If we can find that, we will flesh out the one, true, real mark of the Christian faith that Jesus said would be the one thing that would arrest the attention of the world and prove that what He came to establish was real. And that one mark has been, and will always be,
… love.
This article about the mark of a Christian originally appeared here and is used by permission.
