Love One Another

The Final Apologetic

If there’s a message that the Lord has been speaking to me over many years is it the crucial aspect of what it means to be a Christian community.

What Jesus would say to his disciples the closing evening before he would be arrested and tried is of such importance in our understanding what it means to be Christian. I’m beginning to see that is it not what it means to speak christianly per se, but rather, to be Christians. Jesus said in John 13:34, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” The old commandment was from Leviticus 19, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Now here, Jesus raises the bar and says, the standard of your love for one another will not be your love for yourself; it’ll be my love for you: “As I have loved you, you must love one another.”

In John 15:9, Jesus says again, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” In other words, the standard of love for us within the body of Christ is the standard by which the Father loves the Son.

In the country of my birth, India, I have often shared the gospel with Hindus and Muslims. And of course, you need to have an apologetic for them when you ask them to follow Christ because you are calling them out of a community. Hindus and Muslims have very strong communities. I’m now discovering in the Asia Pacific that Buddhism is also an equally strong community. But when you ask them to follow Christ, are you inviting them into a community or are you calling them out of their communities into a vacuum?

To be a part of the body of Christ is about constructing such communities. That’s exactly what Jesus is saying here in John 13-17. It has to be demonstrable. It has to be seen and felt by people that they would know that we belong to Christ.

The only way people will know that you are my disciples, says Jesus, is to demonstrate it, not individually, but by your relationships—for there can be no real apologetic without a community of love and relationships. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” After we have given all the arguments, the defenses and the evidences, this indeed is the final apologetic.

L.T. Jeyachandran is executive director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.