Love matters
This is us. Though not all of you could be there that night, this image represents “us.” Friends for sure, but oh, we are so much more. Transcending human DNA are spiritual bonds, invisible to the microscope, evident only by love. We are bound by blood, not of genealogy, but of our Savior who has made us one. Yes, we are family, a body, a church—sisters, united by the love of Jesus and by our love for Jesus. If this is a family formed by the sacrificial love of Jesus, and it is, it makes sense that one thing should mark its members—love. Just in case we thought it was optional, though, Jesus makes it very clear. “I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, you must also love one another” (John 13:34, CSB). Love matters in this family of God, and there are love matters that can’t be ignored or love simply doesn’t exist.
One matter we must get right is love’s nature. Love should be lovely, right? We know we are supposed to love each other, and of course we do, don’t we? If it were that simple, I wonder why Paul would warn against hypocrisy? “Love must be without hypocrisy” (Romans 12:9, CSB). There must be something long and hard about real love that would make me want to fake it. If you’re like me, it’s easy to say, but harder to make that squishy, slippery feeling I call “love” become action instead of mere mental and verbal assent. You think you’ve made the decision to love, once and for all. You think you’ve got it, but then you find that some days you’ve lost it. How can that be? Or, you put love on your task list, only to get to the end of the day and wonder if you accomplished it. Even if you sheepishly check it off, you wake up to see it has automatically transferred to today’s list, and the next and the next and the next. It’s never done, and we like done. Check. Not love, it can’t be tackled that way. No, Jesus showed us love. “This is how we have come to know love: He laid down His life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16, CSB). How do you quantify that? As long as there is life left, there is more laying down to do. “Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:8, CSB). Love isn’t valentines. It isn’t for February. Love is sacrifice. It’s for life. That’s the nature of love.
Then there’s the matter of the context of love. Love begins to get a little more concrete when we look at it like Jesus does—laying down our lives. But still, practically speaking, I am not quite sure how to lay down my life for you, my sister in Christ. But Jesus knows us so well. You can almost hear Him say, “For example… ‘If anyone has this world's goods and sees his brother in need but shuts off his compassion from him-- how can God's love reside in him? Little children, we must not love in word or speech, but in deed and truth…’” (1 John 3:17-18, CSB). In other words, love has to show, or it simply doesn’t exist. In order to show, there must be context. It logically flows that love is meaningless in isolation. “Seeing a brother in need” implies connection. Isn’t it ironic that love can’t be known unless it is shown, and love can’t be shown if needs aren’t known. We need to be together, vulnerable and observant. That is part of why we gather—on Sundays, on many days, in life groups, in homes. For us sisters—on 1st Thursdays, on One-to-One days, on just-because days. Not because we don’t have other things to do, but because we have one main thing to do. Together we are learning to know each other, to grow in devotion to each other, to share and care for the needs of each other, to weep and rejoice with each other, to speak to one another in love, to spur one another on to love and good deeds, to encourage one another with God’s Truth, to delight in the gospel together, to sacrifice for one another, to serve together, to pray for each other, to lay down our lives for each other. Because of Jesus’ love for us, we are connected to each other. Because of our love for each other, we must connect. We belong to each other, and that is a beautiful, though often a costly and messy, thing. Love doesn’t exist without context.
In this task of love, there is also the matter of potential. Thankfully, this is not completely left to us, because we mess love up all the time with our selfishness and sin. Love isn’t something we have to figure out how to get once we are in God’s family. No, love is our birth mark. It’s on us, in us, given to us. “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19, CSB). After all, the very first listed fruit of the Holy Spirit, who lives in us, is love. What hope, what grace, what a gift—to be loved by God and gifted with love for others. And yet, for now, we exist in this time and space where love is in us but must also be worked out by us. Chemists divide energy into two classes. Potential energy is energy an object has because of its position relative to some other object. Kinetic energy is energy possessed by an object in motion. In a sense, love is the same. We are full of potential love because of our position relative to Jesus Christ, but that love must be put in motion by us in order to be actualized. I wonder what the profound impact would be were we to unleash our full potential for love!
Why, you may be asking, is this love thing such a big deal anyway? I guess it’s not, if church is another of our clubs or hobbies or a feel-good place we come for some spiritual teaching. If that is how we feel, then we are missing the effect of the whole matter. The effect of love is multi-faceted, like a diamond that flashes a spectrum of lights when hit by the sun. There may be countless points of light, but I simply leave you with two effects that matter. One, it confirms our faith to our own hearts. It says so in black and white in 1 John 3. “Little children, we must not love in word or speech, but in deed and truth; that is how we will know we are of the truth, and will convince our hearts in His presence, because if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts and knows all things” (1 John 3:18-20, CSB). You see, we cannot be Sunday-morning Jesus-people. Jesus’ people are all-of-life all-for-Jesus people. If Jesus’ love is in us, it compels us to love each other, and that love confirms our faith in the truth. But a second effect of love is a more outward and potentially costly matter. Our love isn’t just a birth mark, seen and known by family only. Our active, sacrificial, continual love for each other shows Jesus to the world. “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35, CSB). In Jesus’ perfect wisdom, our identity is “together,” and the world sees Him through our “togetherness.” Not only do we need each other, sisters, but the world needs “us.”
Yes, love matters. When we rightly understand love’s nature, context, potential, and effect, we may be beginning to understand what Jesus was talking about when He said, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39, CSB). How are we doing in these matters of love?
