Love: God's Divine Initiative

HAVING THE SAME MIND

[verses 1-4] These verses are quite challenging. Paul tells us that by accepting God’s selfless acts of love for us, we are in the same way compelled to practice that same love in our relationships with others. How in the world in good conscience can we accept God’s gift of love to us and then turn around and treat people the way we sometimes do? I don’t know why it is, but for some reason, we readily accept God’s unconditional love for us, but we find no obligation to do the same for someone else. And what happens is when it comes to our relationships, we set aside God’s definition of love and substitute our own.

There are a lot of ways we do that. The most common is we make love a feeling or an emotion. How often does our love for someone depend on whether they make us feel good about ourselves, or whether they are attractive or smart? The reason the divorce rate is so high in this country is because someone sold us a bill of goods that said that true love will always be accompanied by an emotional high. And once that goes away, then it’s time to get out or it’s time to seek it somewhere else! There are husbands and wives here today who are at odds with one another because the other person doesn’t do it for them anymore.

What if God’s love were that way? What if God’s love were based on his emotional feelings for us? Do you think he would have ever stepped out of heaven to come to live here on earth to win the love of a bunch of sinful, temperamental humans who can’t decide from one minute to the next whether they will be faithful to him or not? I can’t explain it, but God’s act of love did not initiate out of a feeling. I don’t know what made God choose to love us, I just know it wasn’t based on emotion, or it wouldn’t have lasted long.

WITHHOLDING LOVE

There’s another way we warp the true definition of love, and this is the one that concerns me most. It’s very subtle. This misuse of love comes as we choose to withdraw our love from some. There are a lot of people here who are feeling pretty good about themselves right now because you are very loving person to those whom you’ve chosen to love. But what about those people who, at least in your mind, don’t deserve your love. Maybe it’s someone who’s done you wrong, and by golly, you’ve solved that problem by just withdrawing from them.

I guarantee you there are people in this room right now who will go out of their way to avoid someone else in this room because of what that person had done to them sometime in the past. And we justify it because… they deserves it! They did us wrong. They have a lesson to learn.

I think God has a real problem with people who use righteous indignation to justify withdrawing love from someone. The problem is, we usually go a lot further than just withdrawing from them. Before long, we tear down their reputation. We verbally tear them apart behind their back. And we make sure everyone knows just what kind of person they are.

Paul says, these three remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. If the greatest power on earth is the power to love, then couldn’t it possibly be argued that the greatest destructive power we can have on earth is to withhold that love? There are people all around us that are hurting not because we’ve loved them the wrong way, but because we’ve not chosen to love them at all.