God Never Told Me to Have People Love Me (Food For Your Soul)
Bishop Ron C. Hill has spent time in rooms where he knew the leader didn't care for him. His wife knew it too.
"Don't you know they don't care about you?" she would ask.
He did know. He kept showing up anyway. He kept speaking well of them, kept giving. His reasoning reorders a person's whole sense of Christian obligation: "God never told me to have people love me. But he did tell me to love the people."
Bishop Hill, who pastors Love and Unity Church of God in Christ in Compton, California, builds an entire message on that foundation. Love is not a warm feeling that arrives once people have earned it. "Love is a law," he says. "Love is an act." It is treating people the way Scripture instructs, whether or not they reciprocate and whether or not they ever notice.
That standard has an uncomfortable corollary. If love is an act rather than a response, mistreatment isn't an exemption from it. It's the test of it. Christ was despised and rejected, Hill reminds his audience. "Who told you that just because you obey God, nothing bad is going to happen to you? That's lunacy!"
Sometimes, he says, God lets you find out exactly what people say about you behind your back and does it to watch what you do next. Withdrawing your love doesn't protect you from them. It turns you into them.
Not the Yelling and the Screaming
Much of what passes for spirituality, Hill argues, is volume. Scripture says God is a Spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth, and he is blunt about what that doesn't mean: emotional yelling and screaming, which is often no more than human feeling. Walking in the Spirit means ordering your life by the principles of God's kingdom. The Spirit and the Word operate in tandem; there is no discrepancy between them.
He makes the case by observation. You can sit in a room thick with shouting and dancing, he notes, and watch almost no one get healed, almost nothing get cast out. "God moves where he finds love and unity." Where God finds a holy, loving fellowship, he shows up. Nobody has to beg him.
That's also why Bishop Hill calls a loving church the most effective witnessing tool a believer has. A congregation walking in God's own nature. holy and loving, presents the gospel more clearly than any argument can. The jealousy and infighting inside churches and denominations doesn't just look bad. It blocks people from what God has supplied.
The Undefeated B Team
Bishop Hill played on an undefeated basketball team as a boy, a B team, he's careful to specify. Partway through the season, they could walk into any gym and read it in the other boys' eyes: they expected to lose, and Hill's team expected to win. Not because of talent. Because they played together.
Their coach enforced it physically. Do something selfish on the court and he'd hit you in the chest hard enough to take your breath. "He demanded teamwork, and we had an undefeated season."
God won't hit you in the chest, Hill says. But the demand is identical. He points to Psalm 133, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity, and to where the psalm lands: *there* the Lord commanded the blessing. The blessing is commanded on the place where the unity already is.
Nothing on earth, he says, compares to being around someone who loves God, loves you, isn't competing with you, and is as invested in your well-being as in their own.
Going After God to Give
Bishop Hill has no patience for the transactional believer. "Away with these persons who only think about what they're going to receive." Approaching God to get something is, in his word, perverted, and it's how people go off the deep end.
He isn't claiming God withholds. Give your body, your resources, your talents, and it's impossible to hand God anything without receiving more back. But he warns of the alternative outcome Scripture describes: God grants the request and sends leanness to the soul. Hill sees the result in churches everywhere, people with plenty of money and high position who are internally starving.
Love Above Faith
You can have faith enough to move a mountain, Bishop Hill says, and it profits you nothing without love. He's not pitting one against the other, get that out of your mind, he says — but on the question of importance, he doesn't hedge: "The Bible does not say that God is faith. But it does say that God is love."
He draws one careful distinction. Loving is not liking. "I love them, but I don't like the way they live." You can disapprove of how a person lives and love them anyway; you just may not spend much time with them.
And love costs. Treating people the way Scripture instructs will cost you the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, because you cannot operate in those and treat people that way at once. It takes your life.
What it returns isn't stardom or wealth. It's joy, peace that passes understanding, confidence, needs met, life on the inside. For Hill, that isn't the consolation prize. It's the highest life a human being can experience, and for the born again, it has already begun.
