Better Together
The Problem Nobody Admits Walking Through the Door
There is a word in Romans 12 that most people skip right over.
The passage is rich — love, brotherly affection, hospitality, fervent service. There is plenty to land on. But tucked in among all of it is one word that carries more weight than it looks like it should: preferring.
"Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another." — Romans 12:10
To prefer someone means you put them first. You let them go ahead of you. You extend honor before you receive any. It is one of the most countercultural commands in the New Testament — not because it is complicated, but because it runs directly against something every one of us was born carrying.
Nobody is born preferring others. And until we reckon honestly with why, we will keep treating this as a behavior problem when it is actually a spiritual one.
The Inward Bent: This Is a Condition, Not a Habit
Spend five minutes with toddlers and the case is made. The moment you reach for one of their toys, the transaction is over. We smile and call it innocent — but what we are watching is the clearest picture of what every human being brings into the world.
It does not outgrow itself.
The theological term for it is sin nature. The practical experience of it is that persistent, quiet gravitational pull toward your own interests, your own comfort, your own recognition. Paul calls it the flesh. And the average person just knows it as the reason they still think about themselves first — even when they genuinely want to do better.
What makes this harder to deal with than most people realize is this: the inward bent does not check itself at the church door.
It follows you in. It sits down with you. It listens to the sermon right alongside you. And when an opportunity to prefer someone else presents itself — to give credit, to defer, to serve without recognition — it quietly begins negotiating. But what about me?
This is not a problem for spiritually immature believers only. It is the baseline condition of every person who has ever lived, saved or unsaved. The difference is not that Christians stop experiencing it. The difference is that Christians have been given something powerful enough to overcome it.
That something is grace.
"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." — Romans 3:23
Root Before Fruit: Grace Acts Before the Command Arrives
Here is where Philippians 2 does something most people miss.
Paul opens the passage with what sounds like a string of conditionals: "If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies…" Four ifs. But Paul is not expressing doubt. He is not asking whether these things exist in the believer. He is calling attention to what is already there.
Every person who has placed faith in Christ already has consolation in him. Already has the comfort of love. Already has the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Already has the capacity, by grace, to extend mercy to another person. The foundation is laid before the command is ever issued.
This matters more than it might seem.
We tend to approach the Christian life like a ladder — steps to climb, standards to reach. We hear a command and immediately begin calculating what compliance will cost us. But grace does not work that way. Grace is not a ladder. It is a root. And fruit does not come from climbing — it comes from being planted, watered, and healthy.
"Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." — Philippians 2:2–3
The moment you accepted Christ, something was planted in you. God's grace — real, active, already working — began its reorienting work. He did not hand you a standard and leave you to reach for it alone. He moved in, and he has been working in you ever since.
That means the call to prefer others is not an impossible demand issued to the spiritually elite. It is a call to become, in practice, what grace has already begun making you.
It also changes how we talk about failure. The believer who loses patience, snaps in pride, or quietly resents someone else's recognition has not exposed a lack of grace. They have simply not yet yielded to what is already there. The Holy Spirit does not abandon us at that point — he convicts, redirects, and helps us get back up. Sanctification is progressive. We fail. We confess. We return to the root, and we grow a little more.
The Watching World: This Is a Great Commission Issue
There is a verse that has a way of making the room go quiet.
"If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." — 1 John 4:20
That is not a pastoral suggestion. That is a diagnosis. And it connects directly to why the love expressed inside a local church is not simply a matter of congregational health — it is a matter of witness.
The unsaved person watching your life cannot work through systematic theology. They are not equipped to evaluate doctrine or weigh eschatological frameworks. But they can read a room. They can tell the difference between a community where people genuinely prefer one another and a place where everyone is quietly working the angles.
Jesus said it plainly:
"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." — John 13:35
Not love for yourself — you already have that. Love for one another. The kind that shows up before you feel like it. That looks for someone to serve rather than someone to impress. That gives without keeping a ledger.
A church where that love has grown cold does not simply become less pleasant. It becomes illegible. The watching world looks at it and sees nothing it cannot already find elsewhere. The soundness of the preaching, the quality of the music, the warmth of the facility — none of it substitutes for what the world is actually searching for: evidence that this God they keep hearing about is genuinely changing people.
But when a congregation of truly changed people steps into its community — preferring, serving, welcoming, giving — it becomes something that community cannot explain and cannot ignore.
That is the witness. That is the Great Commission lived from the inside out.
Ripples From Calvary: Christ Is Not a Model. He Is the Origin.
Philippians 2 does not end with the command. It ends with Christ.
"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant… he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." — Philippians 2:5–8
He was equal with God. He owed nothing to anyone. And he made himself of no reputation — born not in a palace but in a manger, raised not as royalty but as a carpenter's son, and taken not to a throne but to a cross.
His whole life, from Bethlehem to Calvary, was fixed not on his own things but on ours.
We have to be careful not to misread this. Paul is not holding Jesus up as a motivational example — as if the goal were to look at what Christ did and try harder to be like him. That reading keeps you on the ladder. It puts the weight on your effort and treats Christ as an inspiring figure you are attempting to imitate from a distance.
But that is not what Paul says. He says: let this mind be in you. Not admire it. Not sing about it. In you.
The love that took Christ to the cross is the same love that grace is now working into every believer. Every time you race to honor someone before yourself, there is a ripple from Calvary. Every time you open your hands to meet a need no one else will notice or applaud, there is a ripple from Calvary. Every time this church moves into its community — not out of obligation, but because it is being moved by something it did not manufacture — there is a ripple from Calvary.
Christ did not wait for us to deserve his preference. He looked at us in our sin, our self-obsession, our enmity toward him — and he preferred us anyway.
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." — John 3:16
That is the origin. That is the ground on which every act of preferring one another stands.
The world already knows how to love itself. What it has never been able to explain — and what it is always watching for — is a church that does not.
Where Do You Go From Here?
Name one person you can prefer this week.
Not in theory. One real name. Someone in your church, your family, your neighborhood. Someone you can go to — by the grace already working in you — and say with your actions: you matter more to me right now than my comfort, my recognition, or my agenda.
That is where this starts. Not with a program. Not with a church-wide initiative. With one person, one decision, and one act of grace-empowered preference that sends another ripple from Calvary.
If you are reading this and have never placed your faith in Christ, this is not a standard to strain toward. It is an invitation. The same grace that turned Christ outward toward you on the cross is available to you right now — not because you have earned it, but because he offered it freely. Cry out to him. Receive what he has done. And watch what grace begins to do in you.
For a deeper look at what to do when selfishness, fear, or discouragement has left you unable to see the way forward, check out Standing in the Dark.