Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

Only those who love are sent by Christ. Without love, Christ didn’t send you.

We never have to be afraid to love. As if love might gag truth? As if it could kill God? Love never negates truth. Love never silences truth. Love is the very foundation of truth. Without love, truth crashes, a clanging cymbal. Without love, Christ didn’t send you. Love is the language of truth, and grace is the dialect of God, and truth is only understandable if spoken with understanding love.

At its core, sin is failure to love.

If the greatest commandment given by Jesus is rooted in love, the greatest sin—and perhaps all sin—must in some way be the rejection of this command. This is what makes sin so pernicious. It orients us inward. It curves us in on ourselves, and in so doing, it uproots love, goodness, beauty, and kindness.

Love is the fulfillment of faith; sin is the negation of it.

Here’s the thing about envy: We are often envious about only the things that matter most to us. Jealousy reveals the idols of our hearts.

Until we consistently live from a place of humility, confessing our sins before God and one another, we will find ourselves gradually turning inward.

When Jesus was tempted, Scripture flowed from his lips. When he was challenged, Scripture flowed from his lips. When he was crucified, Scripture flowed from his lips. One of the ways to live like Jesus is to internalize Scripture so that when we are cut, it spills out.

Our world is fractured not because there’s no state-approved affirmation of “Christian” prayer but because many followers of Christ have not learned to pray in a way that opens us up to God’s healing.

This is because our prayers have not done in us what we want to see done in the world.

Over and over, the invitation from Jesus is to dwell, abide, remain, and stay with him. This is the essence of contemplative prayer. In contemplative prayer, our aim is not to do something for God, or even gain something from him; it’s simply to be with God.

What kind of Christian am I? One who lives according to my own appetite or self-obsessed power, or one who desires to be shaped by Jesus’s self-giving love?

Jesus reminds us that pride is most dangerous in religious contexts because it can look like godliness.

But justice for the Christian is not about freedom or liberty, rights, individualism, or the pursuit of happiness. When that is what justice means to the Christian, that Christian has adopted Western values as the standard by which justice is defined. Christians can’t let the U.S. Constitution (or John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx) define what “justice” means. We have to define justice in a way consistent with what Jesus meant by “kingdom.”

Justice is to be aimed at restoration, not simply retribution.

It’s ironic that Christians who believe in salvation by grace and not our merit can be so formed by a social theology of meritocracy.

We are not called to fix the world but to faithfully respond with the resources, strength, and love we have.

At the end of it all, Jesus will not say, “Well done, good and successful servant” or “Well done, good and influential servant” or “Well done, good and high-capacity servant,” but rather, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” (Matthew 25:21).