December 24
December 24
The Christian life is one of love. Do you live a loving life?
I find 1 John 4 to be one of the most humbling and convicting passages in all of Scripture:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us . . .
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:7–12, 20–21)
These verses expose the ugliness of my sinful self-focus, with all of its judgment, impatience, and irritation. My root problem isn’t horizontal; that is, my main problem is not that I don’t love other people enough. No, my problem is that I don’t love God enough. And because I don’t, I continually try to usurp God and make life all about me. Only when God is in his rightful place in my heart will people be in the appropriate place in my life. Problems of love in marriage, parenting, extended family, friendship, neighborhood, and church cannot be resolved horizontally until they are first fixed vertically. Lack of love for God will always result in lack of love for the people he has placed in my life.
John says that the sure sign you are a born-again child of God is a life of love. Think about this. The sign is not your biblical literacy, theological knowledge, or ministry experience and success. The sure sign that God abides in you, in redeeming power and grace, is that you love those around you. Why is this true? Because love isn’t natural for us. Self-focus, self-love, and self-care are natural, but it takes supernatural grace to turn us into people who really do love our neighbors as ourselves.
To make his point crystal clear, John summarizes his call to love by essentially saying, “If you don’t love your brothers and sisters, whom you can see, then you don’t actually love God, whom you can’t see.” These are devastating words to read. Open your heart and take them in. They are meant to shock us out of our Christian smugness and drive us to Jesus for his forgiving grace and empowering mercy. May we love one another better because we have come to love our Lord more.