Dearly Beloved: How God's Love for His Church Deepens Our Love for Each Other

By Vermon Pierre

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to witness, celebrate, and take part in something holy.

We are caught in a love story. The Bible describes our relationship with God as a marriage. But what exactly does that mean? Author and pastor Vermon Pierre ushers us into an understanding of that beautiful, life-giving relationship. By tracing this love story throughout the Bible, Pierre shows how the Lord's beloved love for us can better unite us to one another as we experience:

• how to love with words
• how to love with delight
• how to love with presence
• how to love through difficulty

We are living in a time of greater isolation, disunity, and loneliness. As we learn what it means to be Dearly Beloved, that all changes. Through the metaphor of marriage, we learn how we are loved, how to love God, and how to love one another. This timely resource helps us establish a truer fellowship and deeper unity within the church and a more holistic devotion to Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moody Publishers
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9780802475190

Book preview

Introduction

TO BETTER IMAGINE, FEEL, AND LIVE OUT GOD’S LOVE

I think one of the easiest ways to convince a child that there is such a thing as magic is to introduce them to a magnet.

It’s been a while for sure, but I still recall my sense of wonder and awe the first time I held a magnet in my hands. To feel the sudden pull when I brought the metallic material toward the magnet. A teacher later explained how it worked. If you place the right material in front of a magnet, the two will automatically stick together and stay that way. This doesn’t happen with all materials, though. A magnet won’t stick to fabric or wood. And in some cases there seems to be an invisible force that repels the magnet away from another material. For example, if you bring a strong magnet by water you will see the water move away from it.

Any leader who has tried to create and maintain unity within a local church knows both the highs and lows of such efforts. At times it seems everyone is on the same page, easily and happily united. Everyone sticks together. But at other times it seems almost impossible to keep people united. No matter what you try, they just won’t stick together. And even worse, there are times when the magnetic momentum of the community has turned into people pushing away from one another rather than drawing to one another.

The sad reality is there are more repelling tendencies rather than attracting tendencies in our current cultural moment. Ezra Klein writes in Why We’re Polarized about how we have split into competing identity groups that have only strengthened in their polarization.¹ People increasingly find their own sense of self from how they are unlike others and from their public opposition to those groups that are not part of their particular identity group.

A DIFFERENT WAY

This polarization is not just within the broader culture; it is also within the church. Certainly, the church has long faced the problem of keeping competing identity groups united.² These problems remain with us today, but are now more visible and powerfully reinforced through the internet and social media. We split along multiple lines and have used technology to entrench within our bases. The magnetic force has swung firmly in the direction of repulsion and has only gotten stronger.

But it doesn’t have to stay like this. The church can show a different way. This happens if we as the church can generate a force among us strong enough to attract people to one another, to unite people to one another in spite of polarizing tendencies. A force strong enough even to overcome the repelling force of our competing identity groups and create a community that would be a uniquely prophetic witness and presence within today’s world.

The answer we are looking for to form a community like this begins with God. The church only exists because of Him. And it’s in how God brought about the church that’s the key to solving the problem of disunity and division. God united Himself to us in Christ, and He did this out of love. It’s because God so loved the world that He gave His Son on our behalf, to save us and reconcile us to God (John 3:16; Eph. 2:4–5; 1 John 4:9–10).

God’s love for us initiated and brought about our salvation and subsequent union to Him. As a result, unity is not something we need to look for; unity is something we already have. By faith in Christ we are already united to God.

And so if we are united to God most especially in love, so also we are united to one another in love. God’s love for us in Christ is the only force strong enough to bring us together to God. And God’s love in Christ is the only force strong enough to keep us together with God as one community in Christ.

Love is, of course, at the heart of everything for Christians. The only thing that counts for the Christian is faith working through love (Gal. 5:6). Love is the home for all of God’s commandments (Gal. 5:14). If we are to be united it will only be because we are united to one another in love (Westminster Confession 26.1).

There is, however, a particular way to talk about the love of God that is especially helpful for thinking about unity with God and with one another. And it is the way in which God loves us as a husband loves his bride.

Our relationship with God, and specifically the Lord Jesus, is regularly referred to in the Bible as being a marriage (e.g., Isa. 54:5–6; 62:4–5; Hos. 2:19–20; John 3:28–29). And as we read in Revelation 19:7 and other passages, it’s the one and only marriage that will last forever.

And in that marriage we are loved by the Lord with a marital kind of love. When Paul tells husbands in Ephesians 5:25 that they are to love their wives, he tells them to do so in the same way that Christ loved the church. Paul goes on to explain that the profound mystery of human marriage is that it is a reflection of the marriage between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32). And so love within human marriage is a reflection of the love between the Lord God and His bride, the church.

The Bible uses this metaphor because the marriage relationship uniquely evokes the most powerful expressions of love—specifically an affectionate, committed love. This is the kind of love that exists between God and the church. It’s out of this kind of love that we must love one another within the church. Love is the key to unity. Love is what united us to God. And love, namely God’s love, is what we need to unite us to one another.

BEYOND THE SUPERFICIAL

When it comes, then, to figuring out how best to love one another, it will begin with God. We love based on the love the Lord shows toward us (1 John 4:7, 12), which means we love out of and within God’s love for us. And since God’s love for us as His bride is such a unifying power, then this is the kind of way we want to love one another as a unifying power among us. We want to love one another in the same way God, as a husband, loves us, as His bride.

Marital love is not the most immediate metaphor you might think of if someone were to ask you what it means to love one another. If you asked a Christian for an illustration on loving other Christians, they might talk about loving someone with the same passion you have for a sports team, or with the same sacrificial commitment that you have for your children. But loving others like you do in a marriage includes all the things we have just mentioned and includes even more than that. Marital love gives us the most embodied, practically realized, fully encompassing expression of love for our church relationships. It gives us the most committed, in-depth version of love. It is the kind of love that has the broadest and most effective tools for nurturing and strengthening our relationships with one another.

Now, obviously, a marital kind of love within the church isn’t going to be expressed in exactly or all the same ways love is expressed within an actual human marriage. The physical expressions of love, for example, rightfully (and thankfully!) stay within the bounds of a one husband–one wife marriage.

That said, we do well to embrace the meaning and sensibility behind marital love when we consider what it means to love one another within the church. Divine love, in all its expansive, affective, and intimate power, is the power we must fully understand and tap into for how we love God and one another. Love like this will bring true fellowship and deeper and more robust unity within the church. It can bring a holistic devotion to Jesus and one another. Christians who love one another like this will better resist the natural drift toward superficial faith and shallow fellowship and the forces of today’s current polarization and division.

We are in a time where people are already divided and becoming even more divided from one another with each passing news event and social media post. If local church communities want to be united in the midst of this division, they must learn to love one another. And they must do so in a way that is not abstract or superficial or cliché. We must love each other in the strongest way the Bible talks about love—through the imagery and language of marriage. This is how we can have a community of people who don’t simply put up with each other or who remain superficial with each other but rather love each other with the kind of passion and commitment that is echoed in the best marriages.

WHAT IS POSSIBLE

Love like this is hard. Especially when the community is made up of men and women, of young and old, of people from different races and ethnicities and social classes. The history of our country and the current cultural climate suggest that being authentically beloved to one another is close to impossible. Bring different people together, and it seems the eventual inevitable result is repulsion rather than attraction to each other.

The church I lead has long been known as one of the more diverse churches in the Phoenix metro area. It’s something I’ve been proud of and frankly took for granted. I never thought our diversity could hurt us. And yet during the past several years, I have seen just how tenuous unity within diversity can be. Differences over politics and race caused even long-term friendships to falter or worse, fall apart. It’s led to many people deciding to leave the church, to find spaces where people were more culturally and politically or even racially like them, rather than embracing a diverse-in-Christ community. In some ways, this was not surprising. Our country has spent most of its history having racially segregated churches. Polarization and division is our default mode. What we see happening is just the latest expression of age-old patterns of behavior.

If we want to break this pattern, we will need to reclaim the Bible’s vision of community: one where people from all kinds of backgrounds can be in one church and relate to each other and stay in relationship with each other, even through differences, even with periodic times of tension, even after misunderstandings and mistakes.

This is possible for the church. We can form communities of diverse people who overcome our historic and current tendencies to form separate, polarized identity groups. We can form communities of diverse people who instead come together and stay together—in close, dare we say intimate, ways. That is, as long as we can love one another. As long as we can be beloved to one another. And that will happen as we draw from the reality that we already are beloved to Jesus. Let’s remember, the Bible tells a love story of God pursuing His people, even in their rejection and infidelity toward Him, even in their separation from God and one another, eventually saving His people and culminating in Jesus marrying His bride, the church, and living with her forever. Because of that love story with Christ, we can believe and live our love story with one another.

In the following chapters, we will look at community and what it means to love one another through the lens of God’s marital love for us. In the first chapter we will survey and reflect on the biblical metaphor of God being married to His people. In the second chapter we will show how our being loved by God as our husband connects to how we then love one another. In the succeeding chapters we will apply what we’ve seen in chapters 1 and 2. Some of the ways we will do this will be familiar areas. For example, we will talk about taking initiative. We’ll discuss the power of words in our relationships. We will talk about this, however, through the lens of us being the beloved spouse of the Lord. Other areas will be new ways to think about loving one another. For example, we will look at how intimacy and delight factor into our interpersonal relationships within the church.

Through all these reflections, the result I hope for is that we better imagine, feel, and live out God’s love for us such that we are drawn that much closer together in His love.

Part 1

HOW WE ARE BELOVED

Chapter 1

BELOVED TO THE LORD

After a full day of activities with my friends and family, I was finally alone.

I was by myself for these last few hours before I would head to the church. I had been waiting for this moment since I knew that Dennae was the woman I wanted to marry. And now the moment was finally here. My life would dramatically change in only a few hours’ time.

And it really did change. From the moment I said I do, my life was bound up with a woman who would never again be only a woman to me but instead be my wife. Everything I thought about myself, how I moved through the world, how I experienced my successes and failures, they would all now happen in the context of marriage to this specific woman.

Marriage is a uniquely defining relationship because of how thoroughly and profoundly it touches every aspect of who you are and how you live. We are living in a time when marriage is sometimes seen as insignificant. With increasing rates of cohabitation, marriage can be treated as just a more formal way to