The Missing Ingredient

My wife’s banana pudding is my favorite. And Dawn’s such a great cook, she’s even adapted her recipe to my low-carb diet. She now makes her world-class pudding, but with Splenda! And I promise, you cannot taste the difference.

Evidently, there are some ingredients you can substitute and still end up with a delicious dessert. But I caution you: leave the bananas out of the banana pudding and Uncle Dave is not going to touch it!

For some ingredients, there is no substitute.

But there’s a missing ingredient in too many Christian’s lives today. And the diabolical thing is those believers have absolutely no idea it’s gone. In fact, they’d fight you if you told them.

And that’s part of the problem: the fighting is the proof that essential ingredient is gone. So what’s the missing “secret sauce”?

Quite simply, they’re missing love.

No, not a mushy sentimental love, but the world-changing love the early church exhibited in abundance. And too many of us are just fake “banana pudding”: all fluff and vanilla wafers, but NO FRUIT!

You see, I’m grieved right now at the hatefulness I’m witnessing from professing Christians toward each other. In church after church, I hear about fighting, backstabbing, and power struggles. Some even threaten legal action against each other, all done in the name of Jesus!

Meanwhile, unbelievers are laughing as they watch those “loving Christians” rip each other apart.

All these people think they’re fighting for “what’s right”. But more accurately, many are really just fighting for “their rights”. And with all their arguments trying to prove who’s right and who’s wrong, they completely miss the destruction it’s causing to the body of Christ.

When Paul is rebuking the Corinthian church for its infighting, he brings up a convicting question:

“Why not just accept the injustice and leave it at that? Why not let yourselves be cheated?” – 1 Corinthians 6:7

Paul goes further to say that by their very actions, they’re already defeated as Christians. Their testimony is destroyed and the name of Christ is tarnished because of it. Shameful!

I know many of us think “love” is somehow a remedial part of the Christian life we’ve long since moved past. We’re interested in the “deeper things” like doctrine and theological puzzles. But love is not remedial for any Christian – you never move past it. It is an essential qualifying element to Christianity, without which all our doctrine and good works are disqualified.

Without love, we’re nothing better than the Pharisees. We have all the right answers, even some right actions, but the wrong heart. 

People without a heart filled with God’s love get so disoriented in the fight that they forget what they’re really fighting for. And Paul warns just by their willingness to fight with believers, they’re already losers in God’s eyes.

When did we start thinking that anything about a believer’s life on this earth was supposed to be about “winning”? Aren’t we the ones who are here as “strangers in a strange land”? Aren’t we of another Kingdom where the “first” of this world will be counted as “last” in the next?

Paul points out that the winning strategy for Christians is to actually give up our rights. It’s better to “be cheated” as Paul encourages than to fight each other and become some atheist’s “cautionary tale” about what Christians are really like.

By fighting for our rights, we’re actually disproving the greatest evidence for the Gospel: God’s miraculous love working in us!

I don’t bring this up causally as someone without a “dog in the fight”. I’ve learned personally how hard it is to turn the other cheek. I know the sting of betrayal by a Christian brother, to be taken advantage of, to be used. In fact, it’s happened recently enough to me that I’m still a bit raw from it.

When you’ve been abused, you want to shout the name of your abuser to the mountaintops. Or more effectively, on your Facebook page and on every social media outlet imaginable. And that’s exactly what some people do.

Scrolled through any Christian leaders’ Twitter accounts recently? You’ll be amazed at how viciously Christians can attack each other.

It’s taken a supernatural love for me not to retaliate. That love is in fact Christ’s love for His church working through me. While I could easily get revenge with just a few emails or social media posts, it would do immeasurable harm to the church.

By the way, I’m not saying when innocent children are abused we should stay silent. We must always protect the weak and stand against the bullies of this world. But as a grown adult believer, my God is all the Defender I need without exacting any “pay back”.

This is how Christians should be known:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” – John 13:34-35

That supernatural love was so evident in the early church even their enemies couldn’t deny it. Early church father Tertullian quoted a pagan non-believing official as saying, “Look at how much they love each other!” when observing the Christians of his day.

Tell me, would non-believers in your city say that about your church?

More personally, would people in your workplace or neighborhood say that about you?

I’m afraid some of us take “love” for granted, like some sappy Hallmark Channel movie. Some more legalistic believers almost consider it to be a weakness. They think our good works or church attendance speak best to our Christian commitment. Somehow they forget love is only real evidence that we are even “in Christ” in the first place! Love is indeed the qualifier without which our Christian works have no validation.

“If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.” – 1 Corinthians 13:3

So love is the one ingredient that qualifies our service to Christ. Without love, our good works are vain and will burn up in the fire. Without love, there’s nothing to distinguish us from other religions. Without love, we destroy people in the name of the God who loves them.

In fact, without love, there’s really no proof you’re a Christian at all. 

In a world that prides itself on its “victim status”, wouldn’t it be great if we refused to retaliate against our abusers? In a world that’s forgotten how to forgive, what if we let our debtors go free? What if we decided our own pain is nothing compared to what Christ endured because of our offenses?

Without that kind of love, no one’s going to believe there’s anything special about our Jesus. And who could blame them?

So fight all you want, but you’re making your pudding without the most important ingredient. And if you’re trying to be a Christian without love, you’re missing some important spiritual fruit.

In fact, I hate to say it but…you’re just bananas.