LOVE IS OF GOD
Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, once said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Why is love so terribly difficult for us sometimes? Aren’t we followers of a God who is Himself love? Surely there must be something we could be doing to encourage the love within us to grow and prosper and become what God intends it to be.
The Corinthian church was trying to compete through the possession of spiritual gifts. They had forgotten all about what Paul called a more excellent way. So what if they could speak in tongues? Without love it was just noise. Who cares if they could command mountains to move? If they lacked love they were just showing off. Not even the ultimate sacrifice of goods or possessions or even life itself meant anything if there was no motivation of love behind it.
We are useless nobodies gaining nothing if we are without love. Love is at the core of the Christian faith. God is love. For God so loved the world; the people and the world He created, not the world as it has become under the influence of evil. By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us. 703 times in the New Testament the word love is used. It was Jesus’ primary teaching. We can’t rewrite our lives, we can’t fix others’ faults, and we certainly can’t force ourselves to get along. All we can do is demonstrate love and view others through the lens of love as God does.
What about those who hurt us? What about strangers? What about those who hate us? Jesus said even our enemies need our love. Anything less is not godly. You think God doesn’t love those who hurt Him, who ignore Him, who hate Him? God even shows kindness to the ungrateful and the evil. That’s what a love-centered life looks like. It looks like the care and the compassion of God.
Imagine if God was self-centered or egocentric. Would He sit back enjoying His creation that was empty of human beings because He wouldn’t have created us to be in relationship with Him? Or would He be amused watching us struggle, not caring to intervene? Would He have been content to let our sins rob us of our souls, never sending help?
There was nothing self-centered about God clothing Adam and Eve, nothing self-centered in the way He rescued the Israelites from Egypt or fed them in the wilderness for 40 years, nothing selfish about giving His Son in sacrifice for sin that was not His. Love is focused on others and how best to serve God through acts of love, care, compassion, sharing and sacrifice. And it’s not just toward those you chose to love or who will love you back. That’s pagan behavior, as Jesus pointed out.
Let us keep one thing in mind; that we are not going to look at other people but rather look within ourselves and ask whether we have love. A human life is only meaningful and worthwhile to the extent that it has love in it, and a life is nothing, is meaningless and worthless when it is without love. A life is worth as much as the love in it.
The only way we can produce the kind of love that models the love of God is by letting God work within us, work on us to make us into the kind of people who can both accept and give love. We cannot do this on our own. Our hearts are so bombarded by the evil in the world, our minds so bound by the value system in which we live. We don’t have to be overseas to be at war. Watch the news and you will see groups at war with each other every day, usually in the place where democracy supposedly begins.
Conservatives against liberals, workers versus corporations, rich versus poor, and on and on it goes. How can love survive a hate-filled environment such as that? And yet, according to Paul, love is the only thing that lasts. It never fails. In other words, it always works, because love is a gift of the Holy Spirit, just like faith and hope, but love is supreme. God’s love for us lasts for eternity. The love we can show to each other has no limits.
If it sounds like a love-centered life is more work than we bargained for, that’s probably true, but it’s not more than we are capable of with God’s help. When you’re trying to change the world you need something to fight with. Our weapon of choice is love; love for enemies, love for each other in a way that shows the world who we are, and that following Christ is not for wimps.
Why is love not at work in our communities and in our world to its full extent and potential? We know it is not because God has lost His ability to love. Truly it must come from us; we are lacking. We know we are. If we are irritated at work because we are interrupted or if we are annoyed by our interactions with other people during the day, we are unloving. If we complain about someone, if we judge someone, if we use words that hurt rather than heal, we are unloving.
I know this is the case for me, and if you are better at avoiding these thoughts, then praise the Lord! But if you are not, then like me you need to ask God to show you a better way, what Paul called a more excellent way, the way of love. Paul said that love covers a multitude of sins. I would imagine that’s how God puts up with us most of the time.
It might do us good to remember that in the early English translations of this chapter the word love did not appear. Instead, it was the word charity. Unfortunately this word has been distorted down through the centuries until now it is something vulgar, invoking images of handouts and enabling and looking down on those who have nothing of their own to claim. True charity is not vulgar, but godly. I searched the internet for definitions of charity. Last on the list was Christian love.
Here is the real test. Can we without fail find ourselves in Paul’s description of love? This is something I like to do at weddings when this passage is read. I ask the couple to listen carefully while I read and substitute their names for the word love. Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Can you put yourself in those verses?
Can you say with all sincerity: I am patient, I am kind. I am not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. I do not insist on my own way. I am not irritable or resentful. I do not rejoice in wrongdoing, but I rejoice in the truth. I bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. The last part is of special note because bear and endure are the bookends holding in believe and hope.
Here’s what makes it so tough for us to adhere to and exemplify this kind of love for others. Paul compared our current knowledge and understanding of all things, not just love, to the view seen in a mirror. Remember that in ancient times mirrors were mostly polished metal, not exactly the same as glass. It is not as clear as seeing someone face to face. That kind of clarity will only come to us when Jesus returns. “It has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
We don’t even have complete insight into our own selves yet, so how could we possibly make judgments about the motivations and choices and faults and gifts of others? And yet, we somehow find ourselves doing just that. We’ve already tested ourselves to see if we fit into Paul’s list of what love does. Let’s see if we fit into the list of what love doesn’t do.
Do we compare what we do for the church to what others are or are not doing? Do we ever speak out about how some folks just seem to take up space, as if somehow the value of what we are doing is greater than what they are doing? Do we ever think some folks here are better than we are, and some worse? The men in the Nazareth synagogue where Jesus read a prophecy and called it fulfilled wanted to throw Him off a cliff when He started mentioning the non-Jewish part of the population God had sent Him to save.
As I said before, love is difficult and we certainly don’t have it all figured out yet. That could be the reason for Paul’s reference to childish things and the purpose of putting them away as we get older. There is always more growing to do, growing in faith and love and in the likeness of Christ. Your salvation does not depend on how well you do this. It does not depend on your having become perfect. However, your relationship to God’s people does.
It is critical to the integrity of all that we believe and hold dear. It is essential to the component of being the church, of truly being the people of God, a people who show His light to the world and who bring His healing power to the nations.
Recently social media has been a proving ground for the loyalties of those who see the world in one way versus those who see it another way. This is nothing new, of course, but it seems to have come to a rather impossible conclusion in this particular political campaign season. What was once merely a polarized country has now become something akin to civil war or the Hatfields and the McCoys. I had to get my token Kentucky reference in!
A recent article written tongue in cheek seeks to shed some light on the absurdity the author sees in this situation. The article is entitled “Maybe I’m Not Actually a Christian After All.” Here is an excerpt:
“I’ve always thought that caring for the poor and sharing my blessings and walking humbly and showing mercy and seeking peace were all inherent in my calling as a Christian, yet from what I can see I really dropped the ball somewhere along the way, because these are certainly not on trend in the Church I’m seeing on the news and in Christian Universities and out on the campaign trail.
I’ve always had this delusional idea that my personal faith in Jesus should drive me to the marginalized and the hurting, that it should move me to defend those who are alone and invisible and voiceless, that my Christlikeness alone was the mark of my faithfulness. I’d been led to believe that a life marked by goodness and gentleness and peace was the desired yield; the visible, proving fruit of my deepest spiritual convictions—silly me.”
John Wesley wrote “Faith, hope and love are the sum of perfection on earth; love alone is the sum of perfection in heaven.” Another minister who preached in London in the early 20th century said something similar, “Through faith alone we are justified before God, through hope we are prepared for our end, and through love we are made perfect. When we go out the doors of this church now, we enter a world that is longing for the things we have spoken of here; not simply for the words, of course, but for the reality.
Humanity, betrayed and disappointed a thousand times over, needs faith; humanity, wounded and suffering, needs hope; humanity, fallen into discord and mistrust, needs love. Even if we no longer have any compassion for our own poor souls, which are truly in need of all three, do at least have compassion for your poor fellow human beings. They want to learn from us how to believe again, to hope, to love again; do not deny them.”
Those words were preached in 1934; alas, they are true today more than ever. So the challenge I offer to you today is this: Don’t wish for others to change their ways so they will be easier to love. God does not offer to change your neighbor, your spouse, your co-worker or your kids. He does offer to change you, to change your heart. He calls you to become a loving person, and when you do you will find that your neighbor, your spouse, your co-worker, and your kids will be different. When you want someone to change, nothing works quite so well as love.
I challenge each of us to become patient and kind. I challenge us not to be envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. I challenge us to not insist on our own way. I challenge us to not be irritable or resentful. I challenge us to bear, believe, hope and endure. I challenge us to love without end.
