Brothers and Sisters in Christ
July 10, 2012 (Tuesday)
Recently the Bethel Baptist Church conducted Vacation Bible School, and we repeated once again the pledge to the Christian Flag, which includes the words, “One brotherhood, uniting all Christians in service and love.” All Believers are brothers and sisters in Christ.
A little incident from 1967 illustrates this point for me. I was on my way to Naha, Okinawa, to visit missionary Dwight Dudley and his family and to help out a little in their work. It was Saturday night. I had purposely asked for the trip to include an overnight stay in Tokyo, Japan, so that I could attend the Tokyo Baptist Church worship services Sunday morning.
The plane landed at the airport and a bus took some of the passengers to a hotel. On the bus were a couple of people who had attended my alma mater. I tried to strike up a conversation based on our common interest, but they were not interested at all. We all had gone to the same college, but we were all strangers, from different generations.
The next day, I went to the Tokyo Baptist Church and met a young man from Hiroshima. We enjoyed a conversation that centered on our mutual love for Jesus Christ. He was a child of God and I was a child of God; we were brothers in Christ. This was 22 years after the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb at the end of World War 2. We were standing in they city of Tokyo, which had been burned to the ground with incendiary bombs during the war. One might expect hostility between an American and a Japanese person, even 22 years after the fact, but there was love.
That love existed because we knew instantly that we were part of the same family–the family of God. The song says, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love..” and that love can be found in Jesus Christ. “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9 NIV).