What the world needs now

“Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”

 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:36-40

It seems to me that this whole idea of love shouldn’t be new to me.  I grew up in church. My dad was a pastor. I gave my life to Christ when I was 9. My husband and I planted and pastored a church for 18 years. You would think, especially since love is what Christ himself said to be the most important commandment, that I’d have a good grasp on it by now.

Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t but  like most things I’ve learned about God, there’s always more to be known.  More to be had.  Deeper levels of understanding to discover.  If we would only continue to seek Him.

Regardless, God has been opening my eyes to this endlessly deep concept of love during the last year.  I’ve heard people describe the Bible as God’s story of love as expressed to humans, but I’ve never seen the beauty and depth of that love like I have this year.  Nor have I seen, until recently, the extreme love that God calls us to towards other believers and the world.

Sadly, I’ve also never seen so little of it.

We live in a broken world, which is no surprise to any of us.  Sin, evil, hatred, division and anger are everywhere. Unfortunately, when the world needs it most, the Church seems to have less influence than it has had in hundreds of years.  I’m convicted and convinced that a large part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten how to love.  The more that our culture has drifted away from traditional Christian values and adopted an antagonistic, sometimes hateful, attitude towards God’s people, the more we seem to have readied ourselves to fight back.  We often dig our heels in as if the truth of God is dependent on whether we can win the cultural argument or not.  We’ve become angry and  judgmental towards not only the world, but also other believers that might disagree with us on various political issues instead of learning to have respectful and honoring discussions. All with the goal of understanding people…and loving them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t stand by our beliefs and express them when the opportunity presents itself, but I am saying that we can do this is a way that doesn’t demonize people.

The Church, as the world sees it, is more focused on disagreeing and fighting than we are on loving one another.  Our posts on Facebook are hateful toward the world and arrogantly dismissive towards the faith of other believers, all because we might disagree on refugees, border control, political figures, etc. I’m reminded of Jesus’ words in John 13:35. ^“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  I hate the thought of what God thinks when he sees his children fighting and slandering one another over these kinds of issues instead of working to be at peace and unified through the important parts of our faith.  Namely, salvation through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ. Until we can rediscover and live out the truths that we are all recipients of this gift of grace, that none of us are worthy of it in our own merit, that this gift binds us together as brothers and sisters in Christ and that He commands us to love one another because we are family – the world will disregard our message as nothing more than a powerless myth.

But, when we start to really love, I believe we will see the power of God move.   Not only loving one another but loving the world as well.  The more we are hated or persecuted, the more we should love.  Isn’t that the way of Christ?  Didn’t Jesus tell us in Matthew 5:44, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”? I Corinthians 13 tells us that we are nothing without love and goes on to describe what that looks like.

Love is patient even when people try our patience; kind even when people aren’t kind; doesn’t envy even when people have something we don’t have; doesn’t boast when we prevail or when we consider our views superior to someone else’s; isn’t arrogant or rude because we understand that “But for the grace of God go I” and because we are humbled by God’s merciful love;  doesn’t insist on its own way even though we may be right; isn’t irritable because we remember how patient God has been with us; isn’t resentful because we “forgive as Christ has forgiven [us]” (Col. 3:13 & Eph. 4:32); doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth because our God is truth;  bears all things even when they seem unfair; believes all things by assuming the best of people; hopes all things when the world has lost hope and endures all things though we don’t deserve it.  Love never fails.

But we do.  We’re human and we fail one another.  We fail God. All the time.

But God never fails.  And he never ceases to call us to a higher standard of love.  A higher standard of obedience.  A higher standard of faith.  He believes in his children and in the power of love.  Why don’t we?  What could happen if we gave up our offenses and our rights and threw ourselves into loving extravagantly?  The way Jesus did.

It’s worth remembering how Jesus loved.  He loved while we were his enemies, so much so that he was willing to lay his life down for us.  He loved the very people his culture disregarded, detested and mistreated.  Even those that disagreed with him. He didn’t defend or fight back when people wrongly accused him.  He asked God to forgive the people who crucified him because they didn’t realize what they were doing.  (What a sobering thought to know He even forgives us when we know exactly what we’re doing.)  He loves us with a long-suffering love that doesn’t grow tired of us because of our failures.  He wants us to know, and experience, the breadth and length and height and depth of that love. Scripture actually says that He wants us to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.  (Eph. 3:19)

Have you ever thought of that?  Something that is beyond understanding is so important that he will help us to understand it. AND, he wants us to express it in such a way that others can see and understand the fullness of who He is.

If you’re like me and have wondered, at times, what your purpose and calling is in life, I have a proposition for you.  A purpose and calling that is worthy of our entire life. To become like Jesus.  To become love. I JOhn 4:16-17 says “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.“ We are called to become the bodily expression of  love to the world just like Jesus was.  To a world that is in desperate need of it. That’s no small task but it will fill our lives with purpose if we’ll seek to understand all that it entails and pursue it with passion.

It seems to me that this is what Jesus called his people to and I pray that we will rise to that call.  I pray that we can learn to offer the world the one thing that it really needs.  Jesus. The embodiment of love.

 “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.  Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.”        I John 4:10-12

“May the Lord lead your hearts into a full understanding and expression of the love of God and the patient endurance that comes from Christ.”   2 Thess. 3:5