On Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy, with Jamie Dunlop (Pastors Talk, Ep. 251)
How can you love people who drive you crazy? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever, Jonathan Leeman, and Jamie Dunlop talk through Dunlop’s book, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy, and the eight truths for pursuing unity in your church. They discuss why God puts difficult people in your church and how to care for them well even when they are wrong. They finish their conversation by addressing forgiveness for others in your church.
- How to Love People Who Drive You Crazy
- Why Does God Put Difficult People in Your Church?
- How to Love People When They Are Wrong
- Forgiving People in Your Church
Related Resources:
Books: Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy, The Compelling Community
Articles: Live with Your Church Members in an Understanding Way, How Love Paves the Way for Hard Conversations, The Compelling Community: What to Do Next?
Podcast: Compelling Community—A Conversation with Mark Dever & Jamie Dunlop
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Mark Dever:
Hello, I’m Mark Dever and this is Pastors Talk. Pastors Talk is a conversation about the local church, and how we try to live and work to the glory of God. Ministry of 9Marks.org.
You can go there to find more information, including old editions of this podcast. Special guest today. Pastor, author, theologian, and triathlete, Jamie Dunlop.
Jamie Dunlop:
Good to be here, Mark.
Mark Dever:
Jamie, thank you for giving me time to do this.
Jamie Dunlop:
Absolutely.
Mark Dever:
I know you’re busy and it’s a busy time of year. You’ve just been on sabbatical.
Jamie Dunlop:
So busy.
Mark Dever:
You’re heading to East Asia. Seriously, to support missions. We appreciate that brother. Just real quick bio for people. You’ve been on this podcast before, but in case people didn’t remember that, who are you?
Jamie Dunlop:
So I’ve spent the last roughly 15 years as an associate pastor with Mark Dever.
Mark Dever:
Now you said roughly, have they been rough?
Jamie Dunlop:
Sometimes. Generally a delight. And I was here as a member for the 10 years before then. I grew up in the Chicago area and had a career in business before I became a pastor.
Mark Dever:
You’re also an author.
Jamie Dunlop:
I am.
Mark Dever:
You’ve written Compelling Community with me.
Jamie Dunlop:
With you. Yes
Mark Dever:
Now, how much of that did I really write?
Jamie Dunlop:
People need to read the introduction, it explains the whole dirty story.
Mark Dever:
And that’s gone really well. We’ve been super pleased with how the Lord has used that book.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yes, he seems to have scattered it far and wide.
Mark Dever:
The idea of the gospel Plus community actually obscures, not revealing, but concealing the Gospel.
Jamie Dunlop:
And the idea that it’s a community that can only be explained by the power of God that testifies to the gospel.
Mark Dever:
The other one you did with Zondervan, Budgeting for a Healthy Church. A stealth book, like if you’re wondering how you can help your brother or your cousin who’s at this church that’s not really that interested or even maybe allergic to 9Marks stuff, this is your way in. It’s a bit of a secret entry.
Jamie Dunlop:
It’s like looking at the car from the bottom rather than the top, right? So you kind of get into the inner infrastructure. And then you see the need for biblical ecclesiology by looking from the inside.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. And you’ve been pleased with how that one’s gone?
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. Didn’t take off as fast, but it seems like it’s had a persistent impact, which has been encouraging.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I think this will never sell fewer. Maybe the first year it sells more because it’s just brand new. But after that, I think its sales would only grow once it drops down to whatever that second or third year is because the word on the street is just going to be so good about it.
It’s so readable and you really tackle the budget as a spiritual issue. Are those the only two books you’ve written?
Jamie Dunlop:
There’s a little pamphlet on giving. Why Should I Give to My Church? But then we have the one we’re about to talk about today.
Mark Dever:
Well, other than that though, you also have a few important articles. If guys want to look at 9Marks.org and you want to name one or two or three articles you’ve written there that the Lord seems to have used over the years.
Jamie Dunlop:
There’s one on deacons, which I think has been helpful. Matt Smethurst’s book is fantastic.
Mark Dever:
I agree.
Jamie Dunlop:
And if you want the two-page summary to begin that conversation, I think that I’ve heard good feedback on that one on Deacons. There’s one on mercy ministry.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, the free market.
Jamie Dunlop:
Our interns read about the kind of regulated free market approach to mercy ministry, which I think has had some usefulness.
Mark Dever:
What does your vote mean as a congregation member?
Jamie Dunlop:
I don’t think 9Marks published that. No. Well, maybe we should.
Mark Dever:
Well, Jamie, you, if you want to know more, about how you should think about your vote as a member of a congregation, Jamie Dunlop did some very careful reflection on that.
Jamie Dunlop:
And so that is a, yeah, that’s an article I wrote that our interns read, but I don’t think it’s ever been published.
How Did Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy Come to Be?
Mark Dever:
Jamie Dunlop, 525 A Street, NE Washington, DC, 20002 and send in 5.95 or your box top favorite cereal, Jamie will happily send you a copy of that.
What we’re here to talk about today is another crossway volume that you’ve published called Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy. Eight truths, you just couldn’t do nine, eight truths for pursuing unity in your church. How did this come out of Compelling Community?
Jamie Dunlop:
Compelling Community is a book that’s about a vision. There’s not a great amount of detail as to how to put that vision into practice if you’re a church member. Compelling Community is aimed at the pastor. But one of the main tenets of Compelling Community, just thinking about the Jew-Gentile churches in the New Testament at Ephesus, is that I think our natural inclination would be to say, we’ll have a church for Jews over here, a church for Gentiles over there.
Eventually, they can kind of start talking to each other, maybe cooperate. But in order to show off the power of the Gospel, Ephesians 3:10, even to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, these churches were Jew Gentile from the very beginning. And as we think about supernatural community in the book, Compelling Community, that’s a key piece of that, that it should be supernatural in its breadth.
Now the question then becomes, okay, so I’m a Jew, I’m in the church in Ephesus or in Rome or wherever with a Gentile, we’re supposed to be the family of God. Wow, this is hard. We don’t understand each other, we don’t share the same background, and we keep accidentally offending each other.
We have conscientious disagreements, like you see in Romans 14 over whether we should drink wine eat meat, or celebrate special days. This new book, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy, is a practical how-to. How do you actually build affectionate friendships with people at church where you really don’t share much in common other than Jesus?
Mark Dever:
It’s at one point, I think, well, I think of Paul and 1 Corinthians, and when he hears about the division from Chloe’s people, those reliable reporters, he immediately goes to Christ.
Jamie Dunlop:
Theological concern, yes.
Mark Dever:
But he seems to see an inconsistency.
Jamie Dunlop:
He says, is Christ divided?
Mark Dever:
Exactly. He sees an inconsistency between their claim to be allied to Christ and yet to be divided from Christ’s people. In your book, maybe you’ll typically take an opposite spin from the Bible, whereas you see Christ.
Jamie Dunlop:
That’s also very typical for my interviewer.
Mark Dever:
You see a church being built only around Christ as the reason why there is division.
Jamie Dunlop:
Sort of, yes. So…
Mark Dever:
Come on, that was not a stretch. I was pretty fair with your stuff there.
Jamie Dunlop:
I think sort of. Well, I would say that the fact that churches are built on Christ alone means you have all the material for division.
Mark Dever:
Right, okay, like the Jew-Gentile, widows in Acts 6.
Jamie Dunlop:
Exactly, Jew Gentile, slave in free.
Mark Dever:
Sorry, Hellenistic speaking in Hebrew. In the Colossian church, yeah,
Jamie Dunlop:
Hellenist in Hebrew. So the New Testament, these churches have all the material you need for division.
Mark Dever:
Right.
Jamie Dunlop:
And yet they love each other.
Mark Dever:
Because of Christ.
Jamie Dunlop:
Because of Christ. And our churches should be the same. If your church is unified simply because you agree on everything you care about, I don’t think your unity shows off the power of the gospel. But if your church is built of people who actually disagree and don’t understand each other and find friendship to be a challenge sometimes, then when you persevere in unity, it does show off the power of the gospel.
Mark Dever:
Do you tell real stories in this book?
Jamie Dunlop:
Almost all of them are real stories.
Mark Dever:
I’m interested in the almost.
Jamie Dunlop:
Well, some are composites where I’ve taken two or three real stories and tried to combine them.
Mark Dever:
So let’s say I am reading this book and I am among a minority of people who read this book. I actually personally know Jamie Dunlop. Should I expect to find myself in this book?
Jamie Dunlop:
If you find yourself in the book for real, I’ve already talked to you about it and gotten your permission. For every story I have permission. In this case some listeners may be wondering because they happen to know me.
Why Does God Put Difficult People in Your Church?
Mark Dever:
You start off with why God put difficult people in my church. Why did he?
Jamie Dunlop:
Because in his profound wisdom, he wanted you to love them and through your love for those people to display the power of what he’s done in your life. One phrase I use here is that easy love rarely shows off gospel power.
I think it’s important to note as well that he put difficult people in your church because when you build friendships based on Christ, that’s the path to great joy. So this book is not just do the hard thing because it’s the hard thing.
This is why we should invest in places where we find friendship to be challenging in the local church, hoping, trusting that because they are our brothers in Christ or our sisters in Christ, we will be able to develop friendship and trusting that in the process of doing that, we will build a friendship, which is a goldmine of joy and satisfaction for ourselves, even in this life, in addition to being a wonderful eternal testimony to the power of Christ to unite.
Mark Dever:
Amen. I’m Wilbur. I’ve been pastoring my church for almost 40 years in Michigan. You know, we’ve had the same families in the church for a long time. I read this book and I’m really struck by it.
And, you know, I realized that uh, Tom Johnson is, has been a problem in my side for 30 years. Should I give Tom a copy of this book to read?
Jamie Dunlop:
Uh, it’s an excellent question.
Mark Dever:
Is that what this book is?
Jamie Dunlop:
It is not for that. It may be the kind of book where
Mark Dever:
But, again, I’m pastor Wilbur, and man, you have been reading my mail.
Jamie Dunlop:
You’re like, how do I use this book?
Mark Dever:
It’s like, he’s been looking over my shoulder.
How to Love People Who Drive You Crazy
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. Well, I think what you’re going to find is that this book is much more suited for Wilbur than it is for Tom. The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, love the ones who drive you crazy. There’s a little self-righteousness there, right?
They’re the problem, not me. What you find as you read through the book, is the book is entirely about changing my perspective toward them, not about getting them to change.
So in that situation, I’d say Wilbur, it’s a great book for you to read to help you have enthusiasm and joy in your love for Tom. I think it might be a great thing for Tom to read. Tom needs to want to read it.
He needs to want to extend his friendship with you. This book isn’t going to sort of fix him if you were to think that he’s the problem.
Mark Dever:
Is this a marriage counseling book?
Jamie Dunlop:
No, but a number of people have said, gosh, this would be really useful in marriage. I think all these same perspectives that we find in the local church to love people who are different from us can be profoundly useful in marriage.
You mentioned eight truths, not nine, eight truths for pursuing unity in your church. All I do is walk through Romans 12, a little bit of 13, 14, and the beginning of 15. And what I see there are eight different perspectives Paul gives us to kind of shine a new light on a difficult friendship. My hope is that one of those will shake something loose in your heart.
Treasure God’s Mercy
Mark Dever:
So treasure God’s mercy.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. Treasure God’s mercy. Recognize that the reputation of Christ is bound up. Like you said, from 1 Corinthians in whether you love these people or not. Recognize that when God calls you family, that’s an invitation to discover the ways in which you really do belong together.
I think hope is a significant theme here, that powers are affection for each other. There’s other truths as well. But certainly those perspectives can be very useful in marriage. The power of marriage is the differences from each other and those differences are precisely what will drive you crazy.
Mark Dever:
So staring at the gospel is part of how we grow to be the kind of people who can love the very normal fellow fallen creatures the Lord puts around us.
Jamie Dunlop:
Absolutely. We’ll think about Jesus, Luke 6, when he calls us to love our enemies. He grounds that, be merciful as your heavenly father is merciful. It’s his mercy that empowers our mercy.
Paul does exactly the same thing in Romans 12. I appeal to you therefore brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.
Mark Dever:
You take on some tough topics pretty directly. You put one of them, wouldn’t it be better? Wouldn’t we be better off?
Jamie Dunlop:
Maybe I’ll just read the questions each chapter answers. Yeah. I tried to put them the way I feel it, but I’m frustrated. Right?
Mark Dever:
So friends, if you’ve got to copy the book, just grab a copy of it and look at the table of contents. If you haven’t got it, but you can look at one, I think if you look at the table of contents, you’ll get a great reason why or eight great reasons why you might wanna read the book.
How to Love People When They Are Wrong
Jamie Dunlop:
So why did God put difficult people in my church? We talked about that. How can I love those people, those in quotations? What if I don’t want to love them? Wouldn’t we be better off without them?
How can I be friends with those people? How can I really forgive those people? How can I stop judging and despising those people? How can I love those people when they’re wrong?
Mark Dever:
That last one takes me to Romans 14, 15.
Jamie Dunlop:
That’s exactly where it comes from.
Mark Dever:
But back to your number four there, wouldn’t we be better off without them? That’s a tough question.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah, I think sometimes, you know, okay, I know that they’ve, you know, made them part of my family. Think about 1 Corinthians 12, you know, the, I cannot say, you know, I have no need of you, but I just think, gosh, they’re indispensable. Lord, couldn’t they be indispensable to someone else’s body?
Mark Dever:
Well, in Paul and Barnabas, Acts 15, they split over whether or not to use Mark. So sometimes is it okay that we go to separate churches?
Jamie Dunlop:
Yes, it is. One thing I try to do in the introduction is to help the reader understand where this book is useful and where it’s not. So there are some times when we need to split churches because the gospel is at stake.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jamie Dunlop:
There are some times when we need to leave churches in order to continue growing.
Mark Dever:
I can’t believe you did that. I thought with Jonathan not here, that would not happen this time.
Jamie Dunlop:
I will let the listeners imagine he might’ve done that.
Mark Dever:
Keep going. Alberto is here.
Jamie Dunlop:
So there are times when you need to leave a church in order to keep growing. And honestly, if you are a more mature Christian, you probably could stay, but you’re not, and you need to be realistic. There are times when we’re all.
Mark Dever:
And better you have that assessment than the people around you have to give you that assessment.
Jamie Dunlop:
That’s true. There are times, say, in issues of baptism, we say, okay, we’re all Christians, but we disagree over something fundamental that means we can’t be part of the same church. And honestly, our unity between churches, I think a good testament of the gospel.
But there are some times when I think, okay, this particular disagreement or this particular difference, does not rise to the point where I need to leave my church or they need to leave the church. I should be able to be in church with them, but it is so hard.
Conscientious Differences Between Christians
Mark Dever:
Conscientious differences.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yes, that would be a good example.
Mark Dever:
So many moral issues we’re facing today. How to deal with certain transgender issues. What do you do with the school that you’re in or the military or the company you work for requiring pronouns and you have a conscientious objection to doing anything about that.
And somebody in your church who agrees with you on all the main teachings of God given wonderful gift of gender, but has a different take on how to deal with a derivative issue. Ah, what do you do about something like that? Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
Jamie Dunlop:
Yes. Yes. So, you know, a few categories, issues of conscience, like you just brought up. And honestly, I think the more secular our culture gets, the more we’re running into these things.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jamie Dunlop:
Well, we had sort of a shared morality as a culture. We didn’t often have these points of disagreement within the church, but as the tide recedes, so to speak.
Mark Dever:
I think we did over race in a lot of churches. It depends on what kind of category you’re thinking of, but certainly personal sexual morality, I think you’re certainly in that case.
Jamie Dunlop:
So issues of conscience. I think cultural difference is something that can be addressed as you read through the book of just thinking, okay, I love the fact there’s people from many different cultures in my church, but I’m finding myself building friendships with just the people who are similar to me.
How do I kind of break out of that trap? And then there’s just going to be sort of style differences. Everything from the style of music I like to the style of parent I am. And I look at those other parents and I think, how could you?
Well, there’s no reason we need to have, you know, you could say my church is about Jesus and a particular brand of politics and a particular approach to the transgender question and a particular style of parenting and a particular model of race relations we’re trying to pursue. And we would have a very peaceful church. But that’s not what I see in the New Testament.
Mark Dever:
Well, that’s a compelling community. I mean, there you have a gospel plus church. Which conceals the gospel rather than reveals it.
Jamie Dunlop:
But if I’m to have a church centered on Christ alone, then I think I’m inviting and encouraging differences across all those other matters.
Mark Dever:
Well, and this is why I started off with you and taking the opposite view that Paul does in 1 Corinthians 1. If you have Jesus at the center, he’s assuming they shouldn’t be divided. You’re saying if you have Jesus at the center, you now are getting the materials for how you can be divided.
Jamie Dunlop:
And yet you shouldn’t be divided.
Mark Dever:
Right.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. So I’m totally lining up with Paul there. Yeah. But I’m trying to help us understand that we’re inviting a lot of temptations for good reason.
Mark Dever:
Why we find ourselves in this situation again and again.
Jamie Dunlop:
Which means, okay, go back to Wilbur, your pastor friend in Michigan. When I see these tensions in my church and I feel like, oh my gosh, I’ve wasted this 40-year period. I just want to say, brother, it may be that what you’re seeing is not evidence that things have gone wrong, but evidence that things have gone right.
The fact that you have all these tensions is because you have doggedly centered to this church on Jesus and you’ve not given into pressures to try to build boundaries elsewhere.
Mark Dever:
You’re being strangely encouraging in a difficult situation.
Jamie Dunlop:
I’m trying hard to.
Mark Dever:
Wow. Yes. So don’t get discouraged as you look at this situation and realize it may be a testimony you’ve been doing things right.
Jamie Dunlop:
Well, and part of this book came out of our own experience as pastors in particularly 2020, 2021, where we had a restive congregation. And I think I was driving people crazy and they were driving me crazy and we were talking about it.
And there was a moment in that when I had to make that recognition myself of realizing, oh right, if we all agreed about all these secondary matters, we wouldn’t be having hard conversations. The fact that we’re having hard conversations is because I really do think we’ve built the church around Jesus alone.
Mark Dever:
Jeremiah Burroughs, you know, the Puritan, he reflects on why the Lord has left the differences among us so we can compose ourselves in charity toward others.
Jamie Dunlop:
Absolutely. Well, and so Romans 15, that prayer with which Paul finishes his section on conscientious difference, he says there in verse 5, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
Mark Dever:
In one voice, yeah.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. So when we say that being in accord with Christ Jesus is all we need to be in harmony with one another, to praise Him with one voice, that is what glorifies God. And I think the subtext here is, and Jew–Gentile churches of Rome, if you didn’t have these differences of conscience, we wouldn’t have this opportunity to show the surpassing worth of Jesus to hold us together.
Mark Dever:
Well, and you see also there in verse 4, Romans 15:4, “for whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope”. Hope is what allows us to look beyond the current difficulties.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah, because I think, you know, our culture so often defines us by our past, right? What’s your culture of origin? What’s your past hurt?
Mark Dever:
What’s your power position vis-a-vis others?
Jamie Dunlop:
And the scriptures call us to define ourselves based on our future. And so you do find as you go from Romans 12 to Romans 15, that idea of hope is mentioned more and more. I think it’s found a number of times here in Romans 15 because we have to ground our identity in the future and value what God is doing in the future through us if we’re going to have patience and endurance today.
Forgiving People in Your Church
Mark Dever:
Is this a book on forgiveness?
Jamie Dunlop:
Yes, there’s a chapter on forgiveness because it’s inevitable if you have a church full of sinners who you are different from and of variety of different ways You’re going to sin against each other and you’re going to forgive and I think a church is an unusual place where it’s It does feel like family so you can really hurt other people in the church and yet it’s big enough that unlike your nuclear family you could just decide to kind of avoid that relationship and just never deal with it.
Mark Dever:
You may not be spending Thanksgiving with them.
Jamie Dunlop:
Precisely. And so you can over time without actually having to confront what you’re doing, abandon relationship after relationship in your church because you haven’t done the hard work of forgiving.
Mark Dever:
One of the things you said was important in forgiveness is that you actually fully articulate the cost or the, yeah, the cost of the sin that you’ve committed. You want to talk about that for a moment?
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah, I think sometimes actually C.S. Lewis does in his little essay on forgiveness in Fern something elephants…
Mark Dever:
Fern-seed and Elephants
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah, Fern-seed and Elephants, does a great job of differentiating between excusing and forgiving. But sometimes what we call forgiving is actually excusing. Oh, I understand why you did that.
And if that’s what we’ve gotten used to when we think about forgiveness, then we are not prepared to swallow and absorb the cost of their sin against me, which is what forgiveness really requires. And so, uh, when you say, Oh, it wasn’t that big a deal.
Don’t worry about it. You’re excusing. You’re not forgiving. If you articulate and say, okay, this is what the sin cost and I will now, because of what Christ has done for me, absorb that myself.
That’s real forgiveness. And that’s a far more extreme and radical act than I think what we often think of as forgiveness.
Mark Dever:
There’s so much more useful stuff we could go through in here. We’re running out of time. If you could look at page 131, you do some of the work that you’ve mentioned earlier, but you lay out in three, four steps. You wanna just go over that briefly. I think that might be useful for people to sort of carry away.
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. As you think about differences of conscience in the church, I think it’s helpful to understand what type of difference you’re talking about. And so I just give kind of a taxonomy of four different categories of conscientious differences in the church.
One is the particular issue is sin for one person, but not for another. So drinking wine would be an example. So Paul gives us a Romans 14.
Mark Dever:
Meat sacrificed for idols.
Jamie Dunlop:
Exactly. The second is we disagree on the best way to achieve an agreed upon goal. So we all believe abortion is evil. But the way that person is, the policies that person has advocated are, I don’t think are going to work.
And so we have a real difference, even though we actually agree on the same moral truth. The third is different moral prioritizations. So, you know, it could be as simple as, wow, that family at church go on really flashy vacations.
How can they possibly do that as good stewards? Well, they’re prioritizing things differently all the way to voting, right? Where I’m, you know, handed a preselected basket of moral goods and I vote differently than you because I’m prioritizing those things differently.
And the fourth category is, it sounds technical, overlapping jurisdictions of authority, which is basically the differences that arise because the different spheres of authority that God has set up are conflicting. So I think COVID was a great example for so many churches where the church has authority over its members, the government has authority over its citizens.
There’s now for the first time in some people’s memories, a real significant conflict between those two. And as a result, Christians disagree about what to do.
Mark Dever:
And all those things are bases for us thinking less of each other, being bothered by each other, being tempted to sin in the way we regard each other.
Understanding Obstacles Preventing You From Loving Someone
Jamie Dunlop:
Yeah. So the answer of course is love, right? It’s as Paul says in Romans 15, “Welcome one another for the glory of God”. But I think understanding the kind of particular animal you’ve been dealt can be useful in understanding the obstacles to love so you can get down to the business of loving that person.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. It always helps me to remember that as a pastor, that this is not my flock. You know, it’s not our flock, it’s Christ’s sheep. I’ve not died for them. He’s died for them. And I need to treat each one as one for whom Christ has dearly loved and given himself.
Jamie, you want to close us in praying for people listening, just that the Lord help all of us to be able to love those we find difficult?
Jamie Dunlop:
Absolutely. Yeah, let’s pray together. Lord, it’s amazing that you’ve loved us. Father, I was thinking about the cost of your love for us at the cross. As we think about the extent that you have gone to love such creatures as ourselves, it’s astounding.
And Father, we think about the servant who was forgiven so much and yet went and refused to forgive his fellow servant, comparative little. We pray that we would not be like him. We pray that we would fully understand the depths of what you have done for us so that we would have enthusiasm to love others.
And Father, if there are ways in which this book can help us be wiser and how we can go about that task, we pray that you would enable it to do that so that you would get the glory that as our society looks into our churches and sees unity and love across divisions, it is assumed we’re uncrossable, that you would get glory in our churches now and forever. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Mark Dever:
Amen. Thank you, brother.
Jamie Dunlop:
Thank you.
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