Love
LOVE
Growth in Love
Ephesians 3:17; Philippians 1:9; 1 Timothy 1:5; 1 John 2:5
In all our growth, we must grow in love. Unless we are growing in love, we are not growing at all.
Victorious Living
(Week 46, Friday)
Growth in the Social Application of Love
Luke 10:25-37; Ephesians 4:15; 1 John 3:17
The real test of spiritual growth is whether or not we are growing in love.
Victorious Living
(Week 46, Saturday)
The Love Motive: A Rejected Stone
1 Corinthians 13:1-3; James 1:27; 1 John 4:7, 11-12, 20-21
The demand of present day life is that love be built into the social structure. Not practicable? Then living is not practicable, for living demands love. . . .
Only love can provide the ultimate motive for society, for it would include within itself the satisfaction of the hunger motive. For people who love one another will, if their love is real—that is to say if it is a motive determining action—cooperate for the satisfaction of one another’s distinct and individual needs.
Victorious Living
(Week 50, Tuesday)
The Self-Centered and the Self-Disrupted
Romans 12:3; 10, 16; 13:9-10; James 2:8-9
There are those who think that Christianity teaches that they must love others, but not themselves. This is a mistake. Christianity teaches self-love: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39). If you do not love yourself, you will not develop yourself. So all attempts to eliminate the “self” end in hypocrisy and disaster. If you put yourself out of the door, it will come back through the window, probably in disguise. Frankly and honestly you must love yourself—not as a master, but as a servant—for the self is a glorious servant, but a gruesome master. Those who love others and not themselves, allowing others to sap the life out of them, end in disaster.
Abundant Living
(Week 7, Monday)
Resentments Resulting in Self-Pity
Jeremiah 31:15-16; Luke 23:28; Acts 21:13
Structurally, you are made for positive good will, in other words, for the Christian way of love. When you try the other way, then the machinery of life breaks down, or at least works so badly that it leaves you exhausted and ineffective. Hate is sand in the machinery of life; love is oil, and life works better with oil than with sand. The lovers love others and themselves; the haters hate others and themselves.
Abundant Living
(Week 8, Saturday)
God Rules in Terms of Christ
John 1:1-5; 10:38; 14:7-11
In Christ, the kingdom is given not only character content, but also personal content. In him, the kingdom is no longer merely an impersonal order. When I give myself to the kingdom, I give myself to the Person who embodies that kingdom. That makes my relationships with the kingdom warm and tender and personal. I can be loyal to an order, but I cannot love it. But in Christ, it is possible both to be loyal to and to love the kingdom. For in him, the kingdom looks out at me with tender eyes, loves me with warm love, and touches me with strong, redemptive hands—it is personal.
Christ is the kingdom personalized.
Abundant Living
(Week 30, Monday)
Good Friday Meditation
John 15:13; Rom. 5:6-11, John 19:16-18
Why did Good Friday have to happen? Did it just happen or was it inevitable—inevitable in a world of this kind? It was inevitable.
It was not an accidental, marginal type of happening; it grew out of the nature of the facts. It had to happen. For it is a law of life that where love meets sin in the loved one, at the junction of that sin and that love a cross of pain is set up. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of the loved one and make them its own. If it does not do that, then it is not love. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it whenever the object of its love goes wrong. You may say that the guilty alone should bleed, and not the innocent—it is unjust. But, just or unjust, it is a fact.
If you would say to a mother whose son is breaking his own heart and hers by his way wardness: “Mother, it is unjust for you to suffer in this way. You are innocent; your son is guilty,” would that mother not say in reply: “Suffer for my son, unjust? It is the very thing that motherhood within me demands that I should do.” In the name of a legal justice would you deny that mother the privilege of being noble, of being a mother?
There is a justice higher than legal justice—a justice in which it is right for the strong, at cost to itself, to save the weak; it is right for the holy to save the unholy. This is the law of higher justice. If God is love, then, when that love meets sin in us, the loved ones, that love is bound to wear on its heart a cross of pain. It is inevitable. Good Friday is the outer cross telling us of the inner cross on the heart of God. There is a Christ picture painted in Germany during the famine days after the first World War, and the Christ is famine-stricken too. That is authentic. Christ is hungry with the hungry. He is guilty in the sinful. He makes all these “sufferings” his own. That is atonement.
In South America I was given a stone which had a cross at its center; nature formed that cross there. The cross is at the heart of our relationships; it is built into things. It is “the ground plan of the universe.” Everywhere that love meets sin, love suffers. That is the meaning of the cross.
Abundant Living
Good Friday
Made for Each Other?
John 4:13-14; Galatians 5:14
You must love others in order to be able to love yourself. Apparently God has us hooked; if you don’t love others, you cannot get on with others or yourself.
The Way
(Week 5, Friday)
Liking People and Loving People
Matthew 18:21-22; 35
Christians are people who love people whom they do not like. Impossible? Oh no, for they love them for what they might be when they cannot love them for what they are. They see in every person another person, the person who might become. That very love and faith helps to create that person.
The Way
(Week 16, Wednesday)
Steps out of Self-Centeredness
2 Chronicles 7:14; 26:16
Don’t act as though you have no love for yourself. You do. You are bound to. The Way teaches that you are to love yourself: “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matt 22:39). A healthy self-love is legitimate and right. If you try to act as though you have no love of yourself, then self-love will dress itself up in other guises and come back again. Love yourself, healthily.
The Way
(Week 18, Friday)
1 Corinthians 12:4-11
We must not confound the gift of the Spirit with the gifts of the Spirit. The gift of the Spirit is for all, but the gifts of the Spirit are divided “severally as he will” (1 Cor 12:11 KJV); they are not for all. Paul makes this plain: “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?” (1 Cor 12:29-30). The answer is no!
Paul urges, “But earnestly desire the higher gifts” (v. 31). And then he goes on in the thirteenth chapter, and expounds on the higher gift of love, and adds to it this: “Make love your aim, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy” (14:1). Prophecy here is not foretelling events, but forthtelling the good news. So the power to love and to share the divine love in speech, these are the gifts to desire earnestly.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 12, Friday)
Unity with the Unbrotherly, Even with Enemies
Romans 12:17-20
The idea that we are to be “brotherly” only to brothers and sisters runs counter to the Christian concept. Jesus said: “If you love those who love you, what reward have you? . . . If you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others?” (Matt 5:46-47). We are to give out love and only love, no matter what the other person does. If the person takes it, well and good; but if not, then love like “peace . . . shall return to you.” You will be made loving, for you are born of the qualities that you habitually give out. The loving become lovely.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 20, Saturday)
I Am Nothing
John 15:12-17
Years ago, at my first meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, I read the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians to him from Moffatt’s translation. When I got through, there were tears in his eyes, and he exclaimed: “How beautiful, how beautiful.” He organized love into a national movement for independence and made it a working force. And as we look at Gandhi’s corporate translation of love in terms of a national movement for freedom, and see it in its higher manifestations, we exclaim: “How beautiful, how beautiful, and how powerful, how powerful.” For this love chapter is the power chapter, a description of the only abiding power on earth. All else fades and fails; love alone abides and holds the field.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 24, Monday)
Singing Out of the Heart of Pain
1 John 2:9-11
To get the background of [the] thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, we must be reminded that this letter was written out of pain. . . . This chapter is pain set to music. The heartstrings are drawn so tight by pain that they are thus tuned to the higher notes of love.
But before love can sing, it has to be cut. So it cut in the first three verses—cut away all fancy speaking in tongues of humans and of angels as a sign of the Spirit of God, cut away all boastful claims to prophetic powers and secret knowledge, cut away emphasis on miracles such as removing mountains, cut away all secret boasting about special zeal in giving and sacrificing—cut these all away unless at their basis was love. Where love is not, the Spirit is not. If the first fruit of the Spirit is not love, then the other fruits are rotten to the core. Love makes all the other fruits sound. So if the joy is not a loving joy, the peace not a loving peace, the patience not a loving patience, the kindness not a loving kindness, the goodness not a loving goodness, the faithfulness not a loving faithfulness, the gentleness not a loving gentleness, and the self-control not a loving self-control [see Gal 5:22-23], they are sterile virtues, springing from self instead of the Spirit. Love is creative and makes all the other fruits creative: the joy a contagious joy, the peace a contagious peace, and so on. Love must be the soul of every virtue, or that very virtue turns to a vice.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 24, Wednesday)
Love Is Always More Positive Than Negative
1 John 3:1-3
The first thing Paul says about love is that it is patient: “Love is patient” (1 Cor 13:4). The dictionary definition of patience is: “The suffering of afflictions, pain, toil, calamity, provocation, or other evil, with a calm unruffled temper; endurance without murmuring or fretfulness.” The root of patience is pati (suffer). The first emphasis, then, is that love can suffer, can take it. Since love is outgoing, and since, by its very nature, it insinuates itself into the sins and sufferings of the loved ones, its very first capacity must be to be patient, to have a capacity to take suffering and sorrow patiently. The very first step takes us to the cross at once, where, in a supreme way, love showed its capacity to take on itself everything that would fall upon the loved one. So if love can go to the cross straight off, it can go anywhere. It meets the supreme test, and all the other tests have been met in this initial test.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 24, Thursday)
Love Has No Inferiority Complex
1 John 4:7-9
Love, being power and poise, saves you from the depths and from the false heights that drop you into the depths. For the person who loves another cannot, by the nature of things, be jealous of the other. And the person who loves himself as he loves his neighbor, can neither despise himself nor attempt to put undue value on himself. For the love of the Spirit within makes that person know that he or she is not worthless, but worthwhile; and that same love of the Spirit gives a sense of deep humility that precludes all boastfulness. Maimonides, a noted, twelfth-century Jewish rabbi, said: “Humility is the mean between arrogance and self-abasement.” Love is humility, so it is neither up nor down; it is even.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 25, Sunday)
A Christian Pulse Beat
Matthew 22:36-40
When Jesus says that the supreme thing in life is to love God and others, human relationships say the same thing. You would expect them to say that the Second Commandment—“You shall love your neighbor as thyself”—is obviously right; but the first—“You shall love the Lord your God”—is not so obvious (Matt 22:37, 39). But it is becoming increasingly obvious, for one of the first things in life is to break the tyranny of self-preoccupation; a self-preoccupied with itself is unhappy and disrupted. And there are no exceptions, even if it is a religious preoccupation. Something must lift you out of yourself and make you love something beyond yourself. Only love to God can do that. That is as necessary for human nature as breathing. If you don’t love something beyond yourself supremely, you will be suffocated by yourself. Then, unless you give love to your neighbor, you can’t get along with yourself or your neighbor. . . .
The psychologists who love God and people are integrated and happy people; but the psychologists who are fundamentally pagan are, on the whole, disrupted and peculiar. They get caught in the meshes of a method and don’t get to the message of the Man, Christ! There is no new center of attachment, nothing eternal to tie to. In spite of all learning, you have to love God and neighbor or you cannot get along with yourself or anybody else. Science is gaining faith through its fingertips. Life works in one way—God’s way—or not at all.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 15, Tuesday)
Life-Affirming and World-Affirming
1 John 4:9-10
“God so loved the world”: that is important, for if the world is the object of God’s love, then it is the object of God’s redemption. Salvation is not redemption from the world of people and things; the world of people and things are to be redeemed. This sets the love of God at the place where it is most needed, at the heart of the world of people and things. This turns the dynamic of religion into redemption of the world, instead of release from the world.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 18, Tuesday)
Love Yourself—in God
1 Peter 1:8-9
We come now to [another] step in our gaining freedom from ourselves. . . . Now that you have surrendered yourself to God, you can love yourself in God. A great many are afflicted with self-hate, and to hate yourself is as bad as to hate others. Now self-loathing must give way to self-acceptance, which is permitting oneself to be loved by God. You accept yourself and love yourself just as you love your neighbor. C. G. Jung, the psychiatrist, puts it this way: “The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul [London: Routledge, 2001], 240). That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, or that I love my enemy in the name of Christ; all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do to the least of my brothers and sisters, I do to Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all—the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy itself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness—that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?”
Now since you are able to live with God, you are able to live with yourself, to be at home with yourself and rather like yourself. For loving Someone beyond yourself, and more than yourself, you are now free to love yourself.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 28, Saturday)
I’m Going to Do Something About It
Ephesians 5:5-6
The unveiled face means that you surrender yourself, transfer the center from yourself to Christ. Christ uses you. You are the recipient of grace. And grace touches the springs of love within you. You love in return. Now you can say, with the little boy who said to his father, “Daddy, I love you and I’m going to do something about it.” So you can say, “Jesus, I love you and I’m going to do something about it.” The doing springs out of the loving and the loving springs out of surrender. For you don’t love a person until you inwardly surrender to that person. You don’t love Christ until you completely surrender to him.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 50, Friday)
1 John 4:11-12
The transforming power of love is not only the most effective way of transforming men and situations; it is also beneficial to the person doing the transforming. It is psychologically sound.
All the problems of psychology revolve around the problem of self preoccupation. Love, by taking you out of yourself, is therefore the best therapeutic that could be devised by divine wisdom. Paul says: “If I am in distress, it is in the interests of your comfort and salvation; if I am comforted, it is in the interests of your comfort” (2 Cor 1:6 Moffatt). Here was a “distress” “in the interests of,” and a “comfort” “in the interests of”; both of them—distress and comfort—lifting him outside himself. Distress might have left him in self-centered misery, a miserable man; comfort might have left him in smug self-centered satisfaction; but now whatever happened to him left him with the right center—something outside himself.
Here is the blessing and the blight of some modern movements centered around broadcasting love to everybody. Meetings in which love is mentally broadcast to everybody are popular.
This is psychologically helpful up to a certain point, in that you are thinking in terms of others. But it can leave a subtle blight, in that this may take the place of loving people in concrete situations and providing help in concrete situations. It may and does produce a sentimental type of spirituality that loves everybody in general and nobody in particular. The word of love broadcast remains a word, not the Word become flesh. Jesus did not sit on a hillside broadcasting love to everybody. That would have been the Word become word. He loved people with concrete acts of healing, of feeding, of teaching, and of dying for men. That was the Word become flesh.
Broadcasting love to everybody doesn’t produce movements, except movements for further emotion. Creative movements come out of creative thinking, and creative praying resulting in concrete acts in concrete situations for actual people. Loving in the air may leave you up in the air without roots.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 51, Friday)
1 John 4:17-18
Getting rid of fears and anxieties: . . .
Keep repeating to yourself this verse: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John 18 KJV).
This verse is important—very important—for if there is no fear in love, then the obvious thing for me to do is to love, to love everybody and everything. Fear can come only where love is not. Where love is, fear is not. Fear turns the doors inward, narrows the soul and its contacts, and thus feeds on itself. Love turns the doors outward, broadens the soul and its contacts, and thus feeds on itself. The more loving you become, the more love you get back.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 7, Monday)
Working Out Techniques
Proverbs 25:21; Matthew 5:7, 39-41
Work out techniques for keeping resentments out of your heart and out of your relationships. . . .
Open your heart each day to the invading spirit of love. A man writes, “Resentments come as a result of resisting the wooing of grace.” Grace is always ready to invade and pervade you. Let it in.
Melt people; don’t maul them. It is easier to melt a block of ice than to break it up by smiting it with a hammer.
If a little bit of love isn’t effective, increase the dose. The remedy for the ineffectiveness of a little love is more love. The Chinese have a saying: “Don’t try to put out the fire of a load of hay with a cup of water.” Increase the dose!
When you think of someone against whom you are tempted to be resentful, breathe a prayer for that person and send your love to him or her.
The victory is in your being loving, even if the other person does not receive it. You are more loving for having loved; that is the victory. Rejoice in it.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 9, Saturday)
Everything for the Love of God
1 Corinthians. 13:1-3
Do everything you do for the love of God. You have been doing everything for the love of self; now do everything for the love of God. This changed motive will glorify everything. The menial task now becomes the meaningful task, for it is done for the love of God. . . .
This is the deepest discipline of self I know: do everything you do for the love of God. Then you are not struggling to keep the self under [control]; you are expressing the self on another level with another motive. Then the self partakes of the glorifying of the task; the self itself is also glorified.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 11, Saturday)
The First Fruit Is Love
Psalm 73:25-26
Having the Spirit within results in qualities of being with [many] characteristics. And the first one is “love.” This emphasis on the prime significance of love fits in with Paul’s emphasis in 1 Cor 13:13 (Moffatt): “Thus faith and hope and love last on, these three, but the greatest of all is love. Make love your aim, and then set your heart on spiritual gifts.” The primacy of love in the spiritual life is not an arbitrary, imposed condition; it is inherent. If you have the Spirit, you have love, and if you do not have love, you do not have the Spirit. And this love is not an occasional attitude manifested toward those who love you, but a characteristic attitude of life. Love is the first outcome of the Spirit within, and if it is lacking, everything is lacking.
To grow spiritually is to grow in love. Without love all other growth is a cancer growth, consuming instead of constructing.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 18, Monday)
Smashing and Melting
John 15:9; Romans 5:6
According to the Christian faith, all motives of life, if they are to be sound, are reduced to one motive: love. And this love must not be love in general; it must be love of a specific kind—the love of Christ. The greatest of Christians said, “I am controlled by the love of Christ.” This cuts deep. It is possible to be controlled by the love of achievement, of success, of a cause, of one’s fight. To be controlled by the love of Christ is different in not only degree but kind and quality.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 18, Thursday)
The Love of God Is upon All Flesh
Ephesians 5:2; 1 Thessalonians 4:9
The pattern for your loving is God’s loving. God loves us, not merely for what we are, but for what God sees we can be. God loves that potential person into being. God, therefore, can love the unlovable, for God sees the possible lovable. We can love the same way. We can love people not for what they are, but for what we see they can be. And by our love we tend to produce the person we see; we love it into being. . . . Jesus looked at the inwardly clashing, tempestuous Saul and loved into being the dedicated and harmonious Paul. Love is creative; it faiths faith out of the faithless, believes belief out of the belieflessness, and loves love out of the loveless.
The love of a man is upon his friends, but the love of God is upon all flesh. For the love of God turns flesh into spirit and turns spirit into creative spirit. Then love all, despair of none; and if we are let down, we are not let down, for we end up more loving.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 19, Monday)
One Remedy: Self Surrender
Matthew 22:34-40
Surrender yourself completely to God, for without this surrender there is no love. A woman came up to me at the close of a meeting, and said: “I’ve found you out. You’ve got only one remedy: self-surrender.” I laughed and told her that she was right, for I had found myself out; I did have only one remedy. . . . If you understand the meaning of the attitude of losing yourself in the interests of others, you know how to live. Life takes on rhythm, harmony. If you don’t know this self-losing, then life gets tangled in the flypaper of its own self-interest.
Love can take place only where there is self-surrender. Between persons no love can spring up unless there is mutual self-surrender. If either one withholds the self, then love cannot come into being. It is automatically blocked. If this is true between persons, it is also true between the divine and the human. You cannot love God unless you surrender to God. And you cannot love God perfectly unless you surrender to God perfectly.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 19, Friday)
First Bind the Strong Man
2 Corinthians 2:14-16
How does the Holy Spirit bind the strong man? By stout ropes of increased inner resolution? No, by the silken cords of love. When we surrender the self to God, the Holy Spirit gently unfastens the cords of love, which the self had entwined around itself, and fastens them upon Jesus. The Holy Spirit makes us love Jesus. And in loving him, the self is freed from self-preoccupation. Really free to love, to serve, to create, and to fulfill its destiny.
Mastery
(Week 14, Sunday)
Two Methods of Binding the Strong Man
Colossians 3:12-15
When we allow the Holy Spirit to bind the strong man by the cords of love to Jesus, then his goods may be taken easily. Then temper, pride, covetousness, irritability, and rampant sex drop away as irrelevant. A consuming love for Christ takes possession of us, and by the “expulsive power of a new affection” (Thomas Chalmers, 1857), these lesser loves are cast out. We love something, Someone, better.
Mastery
(Week 14, Monday)
I Do Not Frustrate the Grace of God
Romans 12:19-21
I was about to go into a situation that had baffled me. It was all tied up with resentments and clashes. As I sat writing in a plane, the Lord said, “Lay aside the writing; I want to talk to you about this situation. You are to go into it with love and nothing but love, no matter what happens.” I promised I would. To my surprise, two members of the group came to me beforehand and asked forgiveness for their attitudes. Barriers began to fall. Difficulties cleared up, and there were no problems. Love dissolved them.
Mastery
(Week 33, Wednesday)
Jesus the Redeemer of Waste Material
Ephesians 5:3-10
Jesus took his greatest persecutor, Saul, transformed him into the man who could write the most beautiful thing on love that has ever been written—the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians—and thus made love the greatest thing in the world. The man of hate set love at the center of virtues and illustrated it in himself. Jesus was the redeemer of waste materials.
Mastery
(Week 40, Friday)
The Mastery of Criticism and Critical Attitudes
Matthew 7:1-5
When love gets low, criticism gets high. I find in myself, whenever I get out of touch with Christ, I begin to be critical of others. But when I am in living touch with Christ and therefore filled with love, then that love hides a multitude of sins. I feel sorry for people rather than critical of them.
Mastery
(Week 41, Sunday)
Prosecutor’s Stand or Witness Box?
Romans 2:17-23
We have such partial knowledge of people and their motives that we are in no position to judge them. A little boy looked through the keyhole of an operating room and saw a doctor cutting a patient. He said to the son of the doctor, “Your father is a very bad man; I saw him cutting up people.” We don’t know the why of people’s actions, so we are in no position to judge them. Only God knows that. So we must go out to love up the good in people and love down the bad. If we fail, we are better for having tried, for we give out love and become love.
Mastery
(Week 41 Monday)
You Have Me Doing Everything
John 21:15-22
In living contact with Jesus the mood of life changes. You find yourself going out in love to everybody. The critical attitude toward life and people is dissolved when we get into living fellowship with Christ. Where there is communion with Christ, there are no critical attitudes toward others. We don’t become blind to their faults, but love sees why the faults are there and pities and longs to help. Love makes you understanding. As “Mary” puts it, “I don’t want to be understood as much as I want to be understanding.” Then she adds to someone who had helped her, “You have been like a catalytic agent to me. You have me doing everything without you doing anything but believing in me.” That last phrase is the secret of helping people: “believing in me.” Those who believe in Christ believe in people and in believing in them “have [them] doing everything.” [NOTE: “Mary” was a woman whose conversion and life were a great source of inspiration to E. Stanley Jones. He often quoted her in illustrations.]
Mastery
(Week 41, Tuesday)
His Word Final in Scripture
James 3:14-18; 4:1
The early Christians were simple and direct: We refuse to hate. We have been loved by God when we were enemies, and we will love our enemies into friends. If not, we are the better for loving. If we are killed, so what? We don’t have to live; we can die. And dying we live forevermore. It worked, and won! They were invincible as long as they kept to their principles.
Mastery
(Week 45, Wednesday)
John 16:31-33
I can testify; I know Jesus better than I know any other person in the world. And he knows me better than anyone else in the world knows me, and he still loves me.
Mastery
(Week 50, Monday)
Jesus in a Cosmic Setting
Hebrews 1:1-3
The Incarnation is the incredible . . . love. If love is at the heart of God, then you can expect God to do anything, anything that love would do. And love did this: he who was the Cosmic became the Carpenter.
Christian Maturity
(Week 2, Thursday)
God Is Light on Four Things
Romans 1:19-20
Since God is love, it is the nature of love to create. For love wants beings with whom it can share that love. Parents create because they want children upon whom they can lavish their love and from whom they can receive love in return. God, the Heavenly Parent, is love, and therefore wants children upon whom God can lavish love and receive love in return.
Christian Maturity
(Week 7, Wednesday)
Self-Abasement
1 Corinthians 4:1-4
If you love God supremely, you can love yourself subordinately. Love yourself and like yourself and enjoy yourself. For it is a self accepted by God and therefore accepted by you. The renounced self becomes, strangely enough, the realized self.
Christian Maturity
(Week 8, Wednesday)
Perfection, Not in Character but in Love
John 21:15-17
The Christian position is the only mature position. It is free from perfectionism and from pessimism. It offers a perfection that is possible, namely, a perfection in love. Not a perfection in character. We are only Christians-in-the-making. But we can be perfect in love. And a maturity in love is possible and consistent with a great deal of imperfection in character. You can love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and yet manifest that love imperfectly.
Christian Maturity
(Week 12, Saturday)
We Could Reap What God Sowed
Isaiah 53:4-6
The One that made love, shall that One not love? And the One that put the deep principle—that all love suffers when there is sin in the loved one—shall that One not suffer when love comes into contact with the sin in us, the loved ones? At the junction of that love and that sin would not a cross of pain be set up, inevitably?
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Wednesday)
The Cross Lights Up the Nature of God
Romans 5:9-11
If God is love and it is the nature of love to take on itself the burdens and sorrows and sins of the loved ones, would God’s love not crimson into suffering as that love meets sin in us, the loved ones? Would there not be an unseen cross upon the heart of God, God being what God is and we being what we are?
But God is a spirit and I am bounded by my flesh. How could I know that there is an unseen cross upon the heart of God? How could I know it, except God show me, show me by an outer cross that there is an inner cross upon God’s heart? Has that happened? Yes. The outer cross lifted up on a hilltop called Calvary is the outer cross through which I see the inner cross upon the heart of God. The cross lights up the nature of God as love. Through it, I see that at very center of the universe is redeeming love. No greater discovery could be made, or will be made, than that. That is the ultimate in discoveries.
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Thursday)
Lack Love and You Lack Maturity
Luke 10:25-28
We are as mature as we are mature in love, and no more mature. We may be mature in knowledge, but if we are not mature in love, we are immature human beings. We may be mature in religious practices and outlook, but if we are immature in love we are immature. Our maturity is maturity in love, or it is immaturity.
This is the central and consistent message of the New Testament. Its message is consistent from Jesus, through Paul, through Peter, through John. The finality of love as the highest characteristic of character is the same through all four of these men. There is no wavering, no equivocation, no hesitation; love is central in God and must be central in people. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can take its place. Lack love and you lack maturity, no matter what else you may have beside. Nothing can atone for that lack.
Jesus, God’s final Word to humanity, made love the final thing in character. When a scribe asked Jesus: “Which commandment is the first of all?” the ages and all heaven must have bent over to listen to his reply, for his answer would fix in the mind of all humanity the chief quality in character. A misstep here, and all the ages would go wrong with him, and go wrong in the most important thing in living, the main emphasis in character. But Jesus did not go wrong. He unerringly picked out two commandments from among the thirty-six hundred that the Jewish law prescribed for conduct, and those two emphasize the same thing: “You shall love” (Matt 22:36-39). Suppose he had picked out some good thing instead of the best thing, for instance: “You shall be just”; “You shall be merciful”; “You shall be kind.” Suppose he had chosen any good thing instead of this highest thing. Then the history of humanity would have been different, and humanity itself would have been impoverished. He sounded a clarion note, “You shall love,” and all the ages, whether they have obeyed it or not, have echoed a deep “Amen.”
Christian Maturity
(Week 15, Sunday)
Matthew 5:43-46
We have considered Jesus’ emphasis on the primacy of love. We must look further and see not only the primacy of love, but the sweep of this love. It is not only primary, it embraces the total person, loving God totally and neighbor and self equally. Never was love so complete in its sweep and so deep in its depths as here defined in a few swift words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Note that the total person is to love God totally “with all your heart”—the affectional nature; “with all your soul”—the volitional, deciding nature; “with all your mind”—the intellectual nature; “with all your strength”—the physical nature. The whole person is to love God wholly—no part left out.
Note that Jesus put in “with all your mind.” It was not in the quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5. That addition was important. It annexed the whole world of science, philosophy, and psychology in a single phrase. Had that phrase been left out, Christianity would have been on the edges of the modern world looking wistfully in, but not at home. Now it is at home in the world of science and investigation.
Christian Maturity
(Week 15, Monday)
Perfect Standard and Perfect Content
Philippians 2:5-11
“Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12) is the high-water mark of human conduct in the ethical history of humankind. What philosophers, moralists, and religious thinkers have reached after through the ages, Jesus distilled in a sentence. They cannot utter that sentence, because the sentence isn’t a verbal sentence, it is a vital sentence. The content of the most beautiful life that has ever been lived has gone into it. No one else can utter it, for it can’t be uttered, it has to be lived. That sentence is vascular. Cut it and it will bleed, will bleed with the lifeblood of the Son of God. Thirty-three years of unstained living and loving have come into it. And more, the cross has gone into it. And more still, the resurrection has gone into it. It is suffering love, but it is also triumphant love. That love won out in the end. And it will win out—in the end. It is the purest and most potent power in the universe, the love of Christ.
Christian Maturity
(Week 16, Sunday)
John 15:17-19
James, with his intense interest in pragmatic values, picks out one law as the “royal law,” the law that governs all laws: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Jas 2:8). He fails to put in the moral royal law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart . . .”; hence his epistle lacks height as well as depth. It is more horizontal than vertical. It is not “an epistle of straw,” as Martin Luther said, for there is much grain here. But failing to include love to God as the supreme impulse, thereby creating faith as the working force, James puts in works toward others as the working force. His social passion is needed, but it lacks the reinforcement and motive of a supreme love to God.
Christian Maturity
(Week 17, Thursday)
Taste of Love in Fruits of Spirit
Ephesians 5:1-2
All the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23) have the taste of love in them: joy is the joy of love; peace is love grown quiet; patience is love stretched out; kindness is love with hands outstretched; goodness is love relating itself to the moral law; faithfulness is love holding steady amid everything; gentleness is love expressing itself in relationships; self-control is love in charge within.
Christian Maturity
(Week 17, Saturday)
Love—the Alpha and the Omega
1 Thessalonians 5:9-10
The incarnation was an incarnation of love. And that incarnation revealed something that lay back in the nature of things, in God. Jesus showed us that by revealing love in himself, he was revealing love as the very heart of reality. It was not a chance note; it was the dominant note in the music of the spheres.
The “thisness” of the discussion and description of love [in 1 John] makes love take shoes and walk, and walk where we walk, along the dusty roads of life. You cannot get into a single situation where “this” does not apply. For “this” scattered twenty-nine times [throughout the epistle] is saying that “this” is that which lies back in reality.
Christian Maturity
(Week 18, Sunday)
Luke 7:44-48
We are certain that according to the Christian revelation God is agape. Jesus Christ is incarnate agape. He also made agape the first and second commandments. Paul, Peter, and John made agape supreme; the cross, which is the center of that revelation, is a revelation of agape, the first fruit of the Spirit of love. There is nothing more certain than that agape love is at the center of the Christian faith. If love turns out not to be central in life, then Christianity turns out marginal.
The question then arises, is love central in us? Is it in the very make-up of our being? Are we made by love for love, and can we live without it? Is the demand for love written not merely in the Scriptures but also in us? Do the texts of Scripture and the textures of our lives speak the same thing? And is that same thing a demand—an insistent demand—for love? If so, we are on solid ground in this business of human living. If Christianity and the inmost basic demands of human nature are at cross-purposes, demanding opposite things, then we are in trouble—deep trouble, life trouble. But if they turn out to be the same, then we can be all-out Christians.
Christian Maturity
(Week 22, Thursday)
To Love and Be Loved: Basic Urge
1 Thessalonians 4:9-10
We purse the thought that the urge to love and be loved is the basic urge in human nature. We can readily see that this is so. For if the self has no love as its basic outlook and drive, it is a disrupted self. Every loveless self is an unhappy, unfulfilled self. And this does not work here and there; it works everywhere: in all nations, in all ages, in all sexes, and in all situations. And it works with an almost mathematical precision. Without love the self withers; with love the self blooms. Then love is the sine qua non for the self.
Christian Maturity
(Week 22, Saturday)
Made in the Image of Love
Genesis 1:26-27
Christianity teaches us that God made us in God own image. According to that same Christian faith, God is love. Not that God loves, but that God is basically love and would violate his the divine nature acting in any way contrary to love. When God made us in God’s image, would God not make us in the image of love? Would God not stamp love as the deepest thing in human nature? God, being love, would have to make love basic in any created beings. It could not be otherwise.
Christian Maturity
(Week 23, Sunday)
2 Peter 1:3-8
We have been saying that the Christian faith, as well as the psychiatric and the humanistic approaches, all converge upon the fact that love is the basic urge and the basic need in life. If so, the question arises: Why don’t we live by love? Why is there so much hate and resentment among human beings? When we give vent to our natures, why doesn’t love come out? When we do give vent, don’t selfishness and hate come out more often than not?
This brings us to the crux of our problem. The answer seems to be that the self-urge can decide in which direction the deeper and more basic urges can go. Love is that deepest urge, but self is the deciding urge. The freedom of the personality lies in the self-urge. The self is free to choose. It can direct the love urge. It can entwine this love urge around itself. In that case self-love becomes dominant; the personality becomes self-centered. In that case agape becomes eros and is prostituted to lower ends. An unhappy, self-centered person results.
Christian Maturity
(Week 23, Friday)
Faith Working through Love
2 Corinthians 5:14-15
The Christian faith does not need protection; it needs proclamation. It is its own defense. You don’t have to protect the sun because someone throws mud at it. The sun shines and is its own protection. But [some] nervous souls are always trying to steady the ark. If they would go out and love everybody, that would be a protection of the Christian faith for it would be a proclamation of that faith.
Our faith must work by love. Love is the applied edge of that faith. It is faith in shoes; faith going out to serve the least, the last, the lost. When our faith works by love, then that shows that we have faith in love. If we perish loving, we perish; we have no other way. It is love or nothing. We will not call in hate and force to fill in where we feel that love will fail. For love never fails. Everything that has no love in it is doomed to failure; love never fails.
Christian Maturity
(Week 32, Friday)
Love in Shoes
1 John 4:20-21
To see whether our love is mature love, agape love, put I in the place of love in a portion of Paul’s description of love in 1 Cor 13:4-7: “I am patient and kind; I am not jealous or boastful; I am not arrogant or rude. I do not insist on my own way; I am not irritable or resentful; I do not rejoice at wrong, but rejoice in the right. I bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.” How do I come out? Are I and love identical? Our growth in maturity is a growth in that very identification.
Christian Maturity
(Week 49, Monday)
Can life separate us [from the love of Christ]? Life can be a more effective separator than death. You can become afraid of life, step out of it, retreat into yourself, and disintegrate. If you become a self-preoccupied person, you will be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Life can separate you from that love, if life can induce you to attempt to live life in yourself.
This retreat from life into yourself can easily be accomplished. Fear of life and failure can induce you to do it. . . .
If we stay in the love of God in Christ we have learned to face up to life; we are afraid of nothing, for in Christ we are adequate for anything. As long as we stay in him, life cannot separate us.
In Christ
(Week 8, Saturday)
In Me . . . in You
I can understand why I should abide in [Christ], for he is divine. He is the center of authority and power and redemption. I was made by him and for him, so he is my home. To abide in him is where I ought to be. But for him to abide in me—that’s different. Why should He? What does he get out of it? What? Except problems and heartaches? With some occasional satisfactions from our response and development in the new life. Then why should he do it and do it, not as occasional whim of wanting to drop in to see how we are getting along, but with a settled intention of abiding in us through thick and thin, abiding in us forever? The only answer seems to be that being love it is the nature of love to want to create and develop and to be with the loved one.
Evidently God wants to recreate and develop us into God’s own divine image, and Christ can do that only from within. He wants to create strong persons who can talk with him face to face, can work with him shoulder to shoulder, and can share the same life and outlook and dreams.
In Christ
(Week 14, Friday)
Abiding in Love
If we are not manifesting our abiding in [Christ] by being a loving person, we are not abiding in him. If our contacts with people are not love contacts, then we have no contact with Christ. It is a simple test, but very profound and important. Some hold that we are abiding in Christ if we have correct views about Christ—if we are orthodox; some hold that we are abiding in Christ if we have correct conduct—if we are orthoprax. Neither of these, though both are important, is the supreme test. The supreme test is: Do I manifest love in all the manifestations of my life? If not, then to the degree that I do not, I am not in him, I am in something else.
Even this must be further qualified: it is not enough to be in love; we must be in a certain kind of love: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12.)
In Christ
(Week 17, Saturday)
Someone Who Is Mad after Jesus
There is . . . an indeed freedom that leads you to an indeed bondage. A Muslim said to me one day, “You Christians are too free. We have to pray five times a day, but you don’t have to. You are too free.” I replied, “But after you pray your five times, you are off duty. I’m never off duty, for I pray without ceasing. And interestingly enough, I want to pray without ceasing. This is a sweet bondage.”
This freedom in Christ is a freedom to choose a deeper and deeper bondage. Love is never off duty. There are no moral holidays in being a Christian. You surrender your all to Christ.
In Christ
(Week 28, Monday)
Seeing God through Imperfect Media
Hebrews 1:1-2
A life came among us and lived publicly for thirty-three years. We no longer see the word love in the light of our poor, partial love, but in the light of a Love that prayed for enemies upon a cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The Word of love became flesh.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 1, Thursday)
The Principle of Motherhood
John 5:39-40
Take the statement: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you.” (John 13:34). Without the last portion, “even as I have loved you,” there would have been nothing new in the commandment. The old content—the content gathered from contemporaneous life—would have remained. That content would have been eros—possessive love, and not agape—sacrificial love. Jesus put the agape content into love by his illustration of agape love. But even agape love is not the norm now; the norm is Christ-like love, which is a norm all its own, sui generis.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 2, Friday)
Titus 3:3-7
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14)—“full of grace and truth.” The first thing in the Christian faith is grace—an act—an act of outgoing, forgiving, redeeming grace. Grace is first, for the first thing in God is love, and grace is love in action; it is the Word of love become flesh. If grace is “unmerited favor,” here, it is Love favoring us when we are not favorable, loving us when we are not lovable, accepting us when we are not acceptable, redeeming us when by all the rules of the book we are not redeemable. Grace is love applied, the Word of love become flesh. That is the distinctive thing in the Christian faith.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 3, Wednesday)
And We Have Beheld His Glory
Luke 9:28-32
We are studying “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). We have considered that grace was first and truth was second. For the first thing in God is “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and hence the outflowing of that love is grace. If the first thing in God were “God is truth,” then the outflowing of that truth would be a statement on how to live life. But that would be the word become word. God as truth would mean religion as philosophy, but God as love means religion as redemption, God acting in love to save us.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 3, Saturday)
The Real Christian, the Most Universalized Person
Ephesians 5:20-21
For the real Christian is the most universalized person on earth. Loving Christ, a Christian loves everybody, for Christians love everybody in Christ. When it was said of the early Christians: “Behold how those Christians love one another,” it was only partly true. They did not only love one another, they also loved their enemies, and they loved the unlovely. When we lose Love, we will lose love. And the more you know Love, the more you will know love. Without the Word become flesh you will soon have nothing but the Word become word.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 4, Tuesday)
What Do I Want to Know about God?
Philippians 2:5-10
And Jesus reveals the central thing in God’s character: Love! “Who is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18). Jesus is not in the arm of the Father—God’s omnipotence, or in the mind of the Father—God’s omniscience. Jesus is close to the Father’s heart—the revelation of God’s Love. So Jesus came, stripping himself of everything as he came—omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence—everything except love. “He emptied himself” (Phil 2:7), emptied himself of everything except love: his only protection, his only weapon, his only method. And Jesus showed that love is the only omniscience, the only omnipotence.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 5, Sunday)
The Highest Value—Love
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
We come now to discuss something that goes to the root of the question as to whether the Christian Way is written within us. The highest thing in the Christian faith is undoubtedly love. Is love the deepest thing in us? Is it written into the necessities of our life? In the deepest necessities? So much so that we can say, “No love, no life”?
Is love the highest thing in the Christian way, its primary value emphasis? It was a great moment in the moral and spiritual history of humankind when a lawyer stood up and asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment in the Law. There were over three thousand six hundred commandments to choose from. Would he pick the wrong one, or a marginal one? If he should choose the wrong one, then the humanity following his emphasis would go wrong with him. But if he chose the right one, humanity would go right with him. The ages held its breath, for it was a breathless moment. The oral and spiritual fate of humanity trembled in the balance. He went unerringly to the highest: “You shall love.” He picked out love as the highest value. And he added to the value of that highest value when he defined the supreme and subordinate objects of that love. He replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. . . . The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31 NEB).
First, love to God. It is not an occasional, marginal love, but, as we have noted, a love that includes the total being. Love God with all your heart—the affectional nature, with all your soul—the volitional nature, with all your mind—the intellectual nature; the total person is to love God totally. And Mark adds, “with all your strength”—the strength of the emotion, the strength of the will, the strength of the mind. And the second is: Love other persons as you love yourself. That is the highest of values: Love to God and love to other persons.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 11, Monday)
Is Science Coming Out to the Supremacy of Love?
1 Corinthians 13:8-13
We have seen that love is the supreme value in the Christian faith, consistently so. So if we work from Revelation down, we come to love as the supreme thing in God and humans. That is the verdict of Revelation. What is the verdict as we work up the other way, from the facts up and out to conclusions? Is some other value turning out to be the supreme value as we apply the scientific method of experimentation leading to verified knowledge? Or is scientific investigation leading to the same conclusion that love is the supreme value in human nature?
In one of my books, Christian Maturity, I took the position that the human personality is as mature as it is mature in love, and no more. One may be mature in culture and knowledge and in ability, but if one is immature in love, that person is an immature personality. And the psychologists are increasingly agreeing.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 11, Wednesday)
What Is the Nature of Life?
1 John 4:20-21
Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another.” (John 13:34 NEB). The phrase that makes the difference is, “as I have loved you.” This is the Word of love become flesh. It gives a criterion of what love is; it is to love as Christ loved. That puts content into the word love. Science can call it “cooperation” or “mutual support,” but that leaves love thin and undefined. For “cooperation” and “mutual support” may mean cooperation and mutual support in any enterprise supposed to bring benefits upon each other: good, bad, indifferent. But “as I have loved you” gives a standard, sets by example. So no human exhortation to love is sufficient unless it is seen what we mean by love in the divine exhibition. The Word made flesh must illuminate the Word become word. Science is earthbound by earth meanings without the divine revelation of heavenly meanings.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 12, Sunday)
Eros and Agape Contrasted
John 13:34-35
Eros is acquisitive desire and longing. Agape is sacrificial giving. Eros is an upward movement. Agape comes down. Eros is our way to God. Agape is God’s way to us. Eros is our effort; it assumes that salvation is our own work. Agape is God’s grace; salvation is the work of divine love. Eros is egocentric love, a form of self-assertion, even if it is of the highest, noblest kind. Agape is unselfish love; it seeks not its own, it gives itself away. Eros seeks to gain its life, a divine immortalized life. Agape lives the life of God, therefore dares to lose it. Eros is the will to get and possess, which depends on want and need. Agape is freedom in giving, which depends on wealth and plenty. Eros is primarily human love; God is the object of eros. Even when it is attributed to God, eros is patterned on human love. Agape is primarily God’s love; God is agape. Even when it is attributed to humans, agape is patterned on divine love. Eros is determined by the quality, the beauty, the worth of its object; it is not spontaneous, but evoked, motivated. Agape is sovereign in relation to its object and is directed to both the evil and the good; it is spontaneous, overflowing, unmotivated. Eros recognizes value in its object and loves it. Agape loves and creates value in its object.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 13, Tuesday)
Why Did God Create Us Free?
Genesis 1:26-27
We continue our meditations on the cross as the revelation of the heart of reality. I have often wondered why God dared to create us and to create us free. It was a risky business for God and the creatures created. To make us free would mean that God would have to be limited. God would have to step back and allow that free will to operate. God could not coerce it, if so the will would not be free. And the will would have to be free in both directions; it must be free to choose evil as well as good or it would not be free. To be able to choose in one direction only is not freedom. But suppose that will should go wrong; it would break its own heart and the heart of God too. For God would have to live alongside that straying, rebellious will as love. And it is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of the loved one and make them its own. If love stays out of the sins and sorrows of the loved one, it is no longer love. But if it gets in, it bleeds. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one.
God, the all-knowing, must have known this. Then why did God care? Well, why do parents create children? It is a risky business on their part to bring into the world children who might go astray and break their own hearts and the hearts of the parents. Then why do parents create? Simply because it is the nature of love to create objects of love upon which it can lavish love and be loved in return. Love by its very nature is bound to create. But the parents say, consciously or subconsciously, “If anything falls on that child, it will fall on us. Its joys will be our joys, its sorrows our sorrows, its sins our sins.” Was it different in God, our Parent? Not if God were love. God saw the risk and took it on one condition, that anything that falls on us would fall on God also. God would bear our sin and sorrow in God’s own body.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 14, Tuesday)
Matthew 5:43-48
Jesus breaks down another division—the division of dividing love—loving your neighbor and hating your enemy. And also the loving of those who love you and hating those who hate you. It must be love unlimited. He reminded his followers that that is the way God loves; God makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and unjust. God loves with love unlimited; and if you love that way only, “so can you be children of your heavenly Father” (Matt 5:45 NEB).
This going down to the bedrock of undivided and undiscriminating love hits at the central division in human personality, loving only those who return love. This discriminating love is not even love, for it has a worm of self-interest eating at its heart. So it is self-defeating. You have to love with love unlimited or you don’t love. For limited love is unlimited selfishness. One who loves only those who love in return really does not love the other persons; all one loves is what comes back from the other person, which is in essence, self-love, not love but selfishness.
And this kind of love Jesus expounds is not an imposition upon life from a high-sounding sage or potentate seated on a dictating throne of the universe; it is the actual revelation of God’s character and conduct. That is what God is and does. And this kind of love in God and persons is the only kind that will save the world.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 22, Tuesday)
The Divine Illustration
Mark 1:16-20
Jesus did not prove how pain and sorrow in the universe could be compatible with the love of God—he took on himself at the cross everything that spoke against the love of God, and through that pain and tragedy and sin showed the very love of God.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 51, Tuesday)