“My love be with you all in Christ Jesus, Amen.” – 1 Corinthians 16:24

Every pastor knows the tension of standing before a congregation where grace and friction live side by side.

The pews and the pulpits alike hold people who sincerely want to follow Jesus, yet also wrestle with immorality, extortion, rivalries, prejudices, and the quiet pull of self-interest.

If we are honest, the church today can feel fragile, always tempted to drift into a depressing kind of cynicism, division, and outrage.

Yet this tension is anything but new.

When Paul wrote to Corinth, he addressed a church in utter chaos.

Members split into camps around their favourite ‘men of God.’

Apart from tolerating idolatry, they sued one another in public courts.

Apart from participating in fornication and using prostitutes, they boasted of their open-mindedness toward a brother sleeping with his own father’s wife.

Some denied the resurrection itself, and many looked down upon Paul saying he was not good enough as a man of God.

So, he spent fifteen chapters correcting them, and the correction really stung to the bone.

Then he closed the epistle with these words: “My love be with you all in Christ Jesus, Amen.”

All the words are crucial but look at the key word, all.

Not the faithful few – the remnant who are perfect in their walk with God.

Look around the Church, with all its beauty and blemishes, and decide to love all on purpose.

His love was for every one of them!

This is grace in its plainest form: the unconditional love of God that goes first.

It does not wait for an apology or for improvement.

Paul did not love the Corinthians because he approved of them.

In his own words, he wrote to them, “out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears.”

His rebuke never cancelled his love.

His love was the reason for the rebuke.

Notice where he anchors it: “in Christ Jesus.”

Paul was passing on the agape love – the divine kind of love – that he had received.

Christ loved him, though he was in his own words, “the least of the apostles.”

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” he writes.

As John later wrote, “We love because He first loved us.”

If love waited until people deserved it, none of us would be loved at all.

This matters now as it did 2,000 years ago.

We live among tribes that hate by instinct and feeds that reward contempt, and believers are not immune.

It is easy to treat people of another race, party, class, or denomination as a threat to be dealt with or managed.

Then the watching world wonders what the church has that it lacks.

Jesus said it plainly: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

He did not specify, which category to love and which one to detest.

So, what does this meditation ask of us this week?

It asks us to move closer when someone becomes a gross disappointment.

Agape love refuses to join the gossip about the errant brother, even when it is true.

It forgives what needs forgiving and shows kindness where none is earned.

When correction is truly needed, it comes with tears rather than triumph, speaking the truth in love.

One warning though.

Grace is not a license, as we saw in the previous devotional.

Paul wrote “my love be with you” just two verses after declaring that anyone who does not love the Lord be accursed.

God’s patience is meant to lead us to repentance, and it should not be taken for granted.

So receive love freely, and then give it away, to all, not just to the lovable and the loving.

Look around the church, with all its beauty and blemishes, and decide to love all on purpose.

Paul’s last word to a failing church was not a verdict but a blessing.

Having said it all, I love you in Christ Jesus! Amen.