Experience: If you would just have more Love how your people (and the world!) could be cured of its insensitivity and self-centeredness. Too often your people look like a Social Club rather than a hospital for the sick. Your people so easily forget the Lord's Greatest Commandment: Love God, Neighbor, Self, (Matthew 22:36-39). Love embraces instead of excluding. Love that will be for all no matter what they look like, what they believe, what they do. Doesn't God love all? Why can't your people be more tolerant?
Church: Love is certainly important. Love is a part of God’s essence and should be of mine. You have named some very important Scripture passages that are at the heart of what I am. But, Experience, for all your lofty talk about love can you define it for me?
Experience: Unconditional, tolerant. Love, love, love.
Church: Those are characteristics of love I've heard a lot lately. I recall the story of how the prophet Hosea was called by God to merry Gomer, the whore. This shows God is faithful in spite of the people's unfaithfulness. God is committed to them even when their own commitment is shaky and tentative and even non-existent. But also in this story God doesn't change who He is for them. God is, in fact, free from them. God can be free because God is so stable in His ability to give love without changing.
Experience: I'm not sure I follow you Church. Aren't you proving my point? God is love therefore the experience of love and giving of love is enduring and eternal. See, Church, you need me. Enter into a contractual agreement with me.
Church: Experience, you too have made me think. Though, love is more than a concept. Love is tangible. More than simply a feeling or tolerance of ideas and behaviors, God's love was tangibly expressed in giving of His Son and how the Son lived and died for the world. God's love is compassionate. God's love is sacrificial. Certainly you are right that experience of God's love should lead toward (and even be measured by our) love for our neighbors. But love is also free from having to bow at the altar of tolerance, because it is rooted and has as its foundation in the Holy God of Scripture. That's why, my dear friend Experience, I must pass.
Experience: Church don't you realize how much you need me? Can't you hear the truth proclaimed by your own Pentecostals, Charismatics, and even the early Methodists? Experience is at the heart of it all. What good is mere belief? Even the devil believes! (James 2:19) I'm not advocating we do away with the Creeds, Doctrines, or anything, but isn't what really matter the religion of the heart! You need me to help teach your people that they need to get out of their pews, out of their fortress style churches and display the exuberance of the Lord! Don’t you remember your own hymns? “I do believe, without a doubt/The Christian has a right to shout…They pray, they sing, they preach the best,/And do the Devil most molest./ I'm bound to march in endless bliss,/And die a shouting Methodist.” (By Winthrop Hudson) Together we could use Technology to help people really experience love through high impact worship services and other virtual means as well.
Church: Experience, haven't you heard, It's not how high you jump, but how far you love?
Experience: Love! Why that's exactly what I'm saying. Now you are finally starting to listen, Church. Your people need more love! Your people can get all caught up in Truth and Doctrines and even Theology. Again, those aren't unimportant, but too often they get in the way of Love. Don't you remember, "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." 1 Corinthians 13:13. Too often throughout your history your people exclude, even murder in the name of Truth.
