The Holy Spirit is the One appointed to get us where we need to be with the quality of fellowship we are destined to enjoy. The Spirit teaches us of God’s way of loving, and challenges us to make that kind of love a priority in all we say and do.
The first virtue on the list of the fruit of the Spirit is love. Some suggest that it is first because it contains all the other virtues. Love is joyful and kind. Love is peaceful and patient. Love is generous and faithful. Love is gentle and bears the costs of self – control. Love defines all the other virtues and all the other virtues define the height, depth and breadth of the love to which we are called.
These words to the churches in Galatia correspond with the words to the church in Corinth. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Jesus told us to love one another as he has loved us. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” What I want can never be greater than this.
An elder once asked me for help with a prayer he was to give at a group meeting. One of the members had died unexpectedly. They were shaken at so suddenly loosing a peer. The prayer I offered contained these words: “We were never promised a tomorrow here. We are only given one day at a time. In that day we are given the opportunity to determine those characteristics by which we will be remembered.”
Over this very short year you have allowed me the privilege to serve as your 139th Moderator. I have had the privilege of representing you and encountering you in eight of Canada’s provinces and in India. I have met some truly amazing people. I have also met a church in many settings facing the challenges of the 21st century. We are learning the posture of a minority. In many places we are moving beyond being defined by our buildings and history.
I have encountered how diverse we are. We contain a very broad diversity of Christian theologies. Our political interests are as different as the Canadian landscape allows. In our personalities, though I encountered some similarities, there were no identical twins. I believe that diversity exists by God’s hand to find among ourselves the beginning place to love others as we have been loved in Christ.
To follow the Holy Spirit in the nurture of these Christian virtues means making the deliberate choice of making love our top priority. How we decide will always be just as important as what we decide.
We live in a decade of significant decisions about our future. We face those decisions as congregations, sessions, presbyteries, synods and assemblies. What we decide will affect how we will be remembered. How we care for one another through those decisions will tell the world for all time who we were and are. It is in that diversity and among those decisions that the Holy Spirit calls us to be a church that will be remembered by our love.
We are entering the season of Pentecost, a celebration of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We will soon enter the season after Pentecost which is an opportunity to find and celebrate the Holy Spirit ministering among us, enabling us to become who Jesus Christ has destined us to be.
I close my year with this simple prayer. “May we be wise in the Spirit and loving in Christ, wherever God calls us in our journey together.”
About David Sutherland
Rev. Dr. David Sutherland is minister at St. Andrew’s, St. John’s.
