To pursue love is to take care of God's heart. Love maintains our relationship with others. Paul taught us in 1Corinthians 13 that among faith, hope, and love, love is the greatest (v. 13). In 8:1 Paul said that knowledge puffs up but love builds up. To forgive people is a matter of love. To visit people repeatedly without being disappointed or disheartened is also a matter of love.
To pursue peace is to take care of God's peace in producing the church for our relationship with others in the church (Eph. 2:14-17; Rom. 14:17b). Ephesians 2:14 through 17 says that Christ crucified all the different ordinances in order to make peace. Our opinion is a kind of ordinance. All the ordinances have been crucified, so we can have peace. The church life in the vital groups needs peace. Christians are divided because there is no peace among them due to their many opinions and concepts. Without peace we become fruitless. We are branches of Christ as the vine tree. We should bear fruit, but fruitfulness depends upon our peace. If the branches fight one another, how can they bear fruit? Our fruit-bearing is killed by different opinions.
We pursue the Lord as righteousness, faith, love, and peace through calling on Him out of a pure heart, seeking nothing but the Lord only, without ambition or any other greediness. We express our opinion because we are ambitious. We want to be something in the church or be the leader in our small group. We need a pure heart to live the church life.
Such a pursuing, existing in the vital group and abounding, constitutes the vital group neither idle nor unfruitful (John 15:5, 16) unto the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 1:8).
Thus, the vital groups can live the normal church life, overcoming the degradation of the church, to constitute the Body of Christ for the consummation of the New Jerusalem, the goal of God's eternal economy. If we live the kingdom life and the church life, we will overcome the degradation of the church. Today our problem is not just Satan, sin, the world, the flesh, and the self. We are facing another strong factor, that is, the degradation of the church. Actually, we were born into the degradation of the church and have been under the influence of this degradation. Second Timothy is a book dealing with the degradation of the church. It says that the saints in Asia forsook the apostle Paul (1:15). Actually, they forsook the apostolic teaching, so they began to degrade. This is why Paul wrote his second Epistle to Timothy.
We can live the normal church life and overcome the church's degradation by exercising our regenerated spirit of power, love, and sobermindedness (2 Tim. 1:7). We have to fan our spirit into flame (v. 6). Our spirit of sobermindedness and power also needs to be of love. We will not let anyone go or give up on anyone when we exercise such a forgiving and loving spirit.
Also, we need to hold a pattern of the healthy words we received from the apostle, in faith and love, and guard the good deposit through the indwelling Spirit (2 Tim. 1:13-14). This is the deposit of the riches of the word, which we guard with the Spirit of God who indwells us.
Second Timothy 2:15 says that we need to cut straight the word of the truth. This cutting is as a carpenter cuts a piece of wood. We should cut the word in a straight way. This is to unfold the word of God in its various parts rightly and straightly without distortion.
In order to overcome the degradation of the church, we must enjoy the Lord in our spirit as the abiding grace. Christ today is the life-giving Spirit indwelling our spirit. Second Timothy 4:22, the last verse of this Epistle, says, "The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you." Thus, the end of this Epistle on how to deal with the degradation of the church is that we must enjoy Christ in our spirit as our abiding grace. This is the way to live the church life in the vital groups under the degradation of the church.
We must live a proper kingdom life, and the kingdom life actually is the church life. Without the kingdom life, there is no possibility to have the church life. The Lord said that whoever would follow Him must deny himself and bear the cross (Matt. 16:24). This is the reality of the kingdom life. It is a life of always denying ourselves in order to kill our natural man with all its preferences. Everything of the old man should go to the cross. Then we can have the kingdom life and the righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees. This righteousness is Christ living out of us as the kingdom life which becomes the church life.