Distinguished in Love

The Mark of Every Christian

By Kie Bowman

The people of my church love the Bible. So I wasn’t surprised when a group of men launched a study of one of today’s most popular systematic theology books to help them better understand Scripture. They met each week for months, enthusiastically reading and discussing what they learned.

One day, while I was studying to prepare a message on prayer, I reached for that book as a resource. Yet I was amazed how little it said about prayer. In fact, in almost 1,300 pages devoted to theology, prayer is mentioned on about 20 pages—roughly 1.5 percent of the book.

That scarcity piqued my curiosity, so I consulted a two-volume systematic theology reference by a different contemporary author. In more than 1,600 pages in two volumes, prayer is mentioned on about 18 pages. In other words, the word prayer is mentioned in slightly more than one percent of the book.

Even more intrigued, I turned my attention to other major biblical themes, wondering how theologians treated them.

If only a few pages devoted to prayer is surprising, the number of pages devoted to love may be even more so. For instance, in the 1,600 pages of the two-volume set, love is mentioned on two pages. Similarly, in the 1,300-page, single-volume work, love is mentioned three times.

Theologians obviously have their reasons for limiting the discussion of these major biblical themes. But, as followers of Christ, we can’t afford to devote only one percent of our attention to love and prayer if we hope to grow strong in our faith.

The Prayer-Love Link

In contrast, throughout Scripture the themes of love and prayer are revisited hundreds of times. In fact, the words themselves occur about 500 times each in the Word of God. One of the most prominent New Testament passages that discusses love and prayer together clearly teaches that love is a distinguishing mark of the Christian life. Prayer causes love to fill every corner of our lives. Stated another way, we need to pray for more love.

In Ephesians 3:14–19, we find one of the most powerful prayers in the Bible. Paul displays his spiritual depth and mastery of spiritual truth as he expresses his prayer for the Church. In verse 14 he clearly refers to his own prayer life when he says, “I bow my knees before the Father.”1 Then, in an almost dizzying updraft of ascending concepts, he talks about the blessings in the riches of God’s glory, the powerful anointing of the Holy Spirit, Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith, and more.

Paul reaches a summit and settles his prayer upon love. He concludes that everything God’s Spirit does on our behalf is so that we may be “rooted and grounded in love” (v. 17). Once we are firmly planted on the foundation of love, he prays we all might experience the Spirit’s strengthening power until we come to know “the breadth and length and height and depth” of Christ’s love—even though he acknowledges Christ’s love “surpasses knowledge” (vv. 18–19).

Paul obviously prayed in the rare air of heavenly realms. He often soars so high above our ordinary thoughts we virtually suffer altitude sickness just trying to keep up!

Extreme Nature of Christian Love

But let’s bring this prayer down to earth for a moment and ask a couple of practical questions:

1. If Paul prayed for us to experience love, shouldn’t we pray for others to experience love, too?
2. Why do we need to pray for love?

First, the words love and prayer don’t often appear in the same passage in the New Testament, but when they do we find a remarkable consistency with Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians. For instance, when he wrote to the Philippians, his thoughts, while more subdued, were almost identical to his intercession in the Ephesian prayer. When he wrote to the church at Philippi, he said, “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment” (Phil. 1:9). Once again, Paul demonstrated a strategy of praying for believers to experience love.

But again, why do we need to pray for love?

One reason to pray for one another to love concerns the extreme nature of Christian love. God’s love goes way beyond the sentimentality or superficiality of what our increasingly empty culture peddles as love. For instance, in describing the second greatest commandment, Jesus called each of us to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Later, the Spirit inspired Paul to instruct Christian husbands to love their wives, just “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25).

Think about these commands: Love your neighbor with the same intensity as you love yourself. Husbands, love your wives with the same intensity the Lord loved us—even as He died for us. These passages offer extreme challenges if we take them seriously. Given the high bar Scripture sets, it only makes sense that this kind of love requires God’s help.

So another reason to pray for one another is that each of us needs God’s help to be able to love each other. And we need to pray others will be able to love as well. The truth is, if God doesn’t help us, this kind of selfless love will likely continue to elude us.

Example of Jesus’ Love

Since we are called to “love one another” in the same way that Jesus loves us (John 13:34), here are three ways to pray:

• Pray for more love for other believers, so you can reflect the love of Christ within the Church (John 13:34).
• Pray God will give you a Jesus kind of love for your spouse and family, so our homes reflect the Lordship of Christ (Eph. 5:25).
• Pray for other believers in your church to be more loving as a witness to the life-transforming power of the Spirit (Eph. 3:17–18).

As twenty-first-century believers, we are confronted with aggressive challenges to our faith. Our culture can be brutal at times, hostile to Christians. And we are more polarized as a nation than at any period in our lifetimes. What will ever bring people back together again?

Love can. The uniting of prayer and love, as Scripture teaches, will mark us as His in a world that needs both His love and ours.

1This and all references in this article are from the English Standard Version.

J. KIE BOWMAN is senior pastor of Hyde Park Baptist Church, Austin, TX. He is the author of two books (I Am and The King and His Community), and he networks with other pastors to grow the 24/7 prayer movement for spiritual awakening in his city.

What Love Looks Like

By David Melber

The small town of Magalia, CA, rests in the foothills of the northern stretch of the Sierra Nevada. There are only a few main roads in or out. So when the Camp Fire (named for its origin near Camp Creek Road) came roaring toward the town in November 2018, the 10,000 residents had limited options for their forced evacuation.

Pastor Doug Crowder of Magalia Pines Baptist Church knew some elderly and destitute people would not be able to leave without help. So Crowder gathered about 30 of them at his church.

The fire first engulfed Paradise (just south of Magalia), which cut off that escape route for Crowder’s crew. They hunkered down in the church, and after the sun went down, the danger grew for those in Magalia.

As the skies turned red, Crowder went out in the middle of the night to find a sheriff’s deputy, who had just come up from Paradise. The deputy gave him directions to get out, and they were loading everyone into vehicles when the fire overwhelmed the town.

“We were in the driveway planning to leave,” Crowder told Baptist Press through tears, “and the entire world erupted.”

Next to the church were a few businesses and some woods, where there had been no fire. But suddenly “the woods exploded,” Crowder said. “The Subway restaurant across the street exploded, and on all sides of us was fire.”

The sudden inferno left the group with only one option: retreat into the church building, close the doors, and pray.

Praying through the Night

Pastor Crowder described a scene of fire consuming the surrounding buildings and myriad explosions as flames ignited propane tanks all around them. Through the night, while the blaze surrounded them, the Magalia residents prayed together and encouraged one another.

“As the day began to dawn,” Crowder recalled to a group at First Baptist Church of Gridley, “we went outside, and there were no more restaurants and no more hardware store. None of the things touching us were there. They were disintegrated and gone.”

Crowder and the survivors walked out into the parking lot, and they could see a wall of fire moving “steadily onward down into the canyon” where the homes of many of Magalia’s residents were located.

The group had just made it through what turned out to be California’s deadliest, most destructive wildfire. With the help of some rain, the Camp Fire was finally contained and extinguished. A few weeks after the fire started, National Public Radio (NPR) reported that the death toll had reached 88 people with hundreds more still unaccounted for.

Of the victims who had been identified, NPR said only two were not senior citizens. Without Pastor Crowder’s efforts, gathering some of the elderly in his community, they might have perished in the fire as well.

As Crowder stood in the parking lot, staring down at the receding wall of fire, a woman next to him (whom he had not known before) said, “I’m so blessed.” Crowder listened to her story. She had lost her home and her car. She had no place to go except a friend’s house in the nearby town of Chico. “But,” she said, “God brought us through.”

Surviving Miraculously

The church building, the property, and the people were all “unscathed—totally,” Crowder told Baptist Press. “As we looked around and everything [was] disintegrated, God’s house [was] still standing, not smoke-touched,” he told the group in Gridley. “The landscape wasn’t burned. Our cars were all sitting around [the church]. God just said, ‘Not today,’ and covered us.”

The day after the fire’s attack, those who huddled in Magalia Pines Baptist Church were finally able to evacuate. Those without a place to go were escorted to shelters.

Crowder, along with many who survived the fire, lost his home and nearly everything he owned. Many of his parishioners and neighbors have a long road to recovery. They mourn lost homes, lost loved ones, and irreplaceable heirlooms.

Loving So Others Live

Every year, thousands of Southern Baptist volunteers respond to disasters such as the Camp Fire in order to bring help, healing, and the hope of the gospel to those in need. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief brings great spiritual and physical aid after floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires.

In every disaster, however, we also hear accounts of pastors and other believers like Pastor Crowder who minister to others as crises loom and break over their communities.

Crowder told Baptist Press that on the Sunday after the fire came through (Nov. 11), he had planned to share a sermon illustration about the words on a pin he received during his military days: “These things we do that others may live.”

“I didn’t get to preach it,” Crowder said, “but we got to live it.”

DAVID MELBER serves as president of Send Relief, the compassion ministry arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.