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By: Charlene Evans

Family. The word alone will cease conversation with some people. For others, it will instantly put a smile on their face as they revert back to years of pleasant memories or at least more pleasant than not. Let’s be HONEST…we love our families with an “unconditional” kind of love but family can be difficult to deal with at times. Unsupportive, jealous, hateful, a burden, disrespectful, and sometimes their behavior can be worse than our enemies, right? Okay, I know a lot of people are not going to agree with me “publically” so “privately” through this article can we “talk?” I mean really just discuss our families for a minute? Cool…so here it is….

I can be mad and hot as FIRE with a sister or brother, my mother or father but if something happened to them or someone hurt them, I will be the first one headed home to check on them and make sure they are okay and prayerfully hope I will not have to act ‘out of character’ in order to protect my family. You know what “act out of character is” right? Well, it’s simple…acting out the bad and negative thoughts that come up when you feel threaten or hurt directly or indirectly. Indirectly means that action being associated to something or someone connected to you and for the sake of this article, I am talking about family.

And even though our relationships with our family are not perfect, that family member belongs to us and they share the same bloodline. Just like the believers of the Body of Christ. We all belong to each other and responsible for supplying our family with support and love, through the good and the bad because this Christian walk is not easy…and it requires us to love like Christ which can be difficult because we don’t always approach each situation in the most “spiritual” kind of way: From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Ephesians 4:16)

So for fun, to prove a point, let’s say you are the “hand” on the body. You can not move without the arm. If you have no arm, you have no hand and vice versa. They are dependent on each other to move but they also have their own functionality that is associated to the body. Without each other working together yet performing their individual functions, the body will not work. This illustration is exactly what Paul was talking about in the 4th Chapter of Ephesians in dealing with unity and maturity in the Body of Christ!

We must be in unity with both “families” the same way…our immediate families and our Christian family. Some will easily argue that some family members refuse to work together or continue to hold “grudges” and with this makes it difficult to love them. Well, here goes a perfect example as a Christian on how difficult it is to love like Jesus and what He has to say about it which can be applied to our immediate and Christian families: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (1John 4:20-21).

Let me tell you something about the love of God that I know to be true…NO man can resist love and if you consistently LOVE someone who dislikes you, eventually they will subsidebecause love never fails. (1 Cor. 13:8) Isn’t that powerful? Yet, it is so hard to practice because we don’t want to continue to try to love someone who doesn’t love us or treat us right. However, the repercussion of not having unity in our families effects the world because how are we going to reach the lost souls who feel disconnect if we are also? If there is no unity in the Body of Christ, why will someone believe that God’s power can truly change a person for the better? The world is dying to see an example of God in the earth and what better way then to make it a priority to connect with one another like the physical joints in a body, performing our individual functions in order to be totally effective for the body reconnecting with disjointed parts!

So in the words of National Gospel recording artist Hezekiah Walker song, “I need you to survive”, consider the lyrics:

I need you, you need me. We’re all a part of God’s body. Stand with me, agree with me. We’re all a part of God’s body. It is his will that every need be supplied. You are important to me, I need you to survive. You are important to me, I need you to survive.