THIS VERSE LINKS two important factors: “because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which you have for all the saints” (Col. 1:4). Here faith and love in Christ Jesus are linked, as they are many times in the New Testament. They are Siamese twins; cut them apart and both die. If you are going to have love for man, you will have to have faith in God, and in the kind of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Jesus joined these two in the two great commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor.” Really there were three commandments: love God; love thy neighbor; love thyself. The last is important, for self-hate and self-rejection is as bad as other-hate and other-rejection.
Pagan psychology teaches the last two: self-love and other-love, but severs them from love to God. It won’t work, for some supreme love must lift you out of eros self-love, cleanse it, and give it back to you as agape love. That supreme love will make it possible for you to love your neighbor, however unlovable he may be, for he becomes “a brother for whom Christ died.” The supreme love redeems the lesser loves.
The Indian government set aside millions of rupees to lift the tribal peoples of Orissa. They had been living in grass huts on the mountainsides. The government built them brick houses at the foot of the mountains. They lived in them a few days, and then went back to their mountain grass huts. A Christian layman asked a non-Christian government official in charge, “Why?” He replied, “We can give them money, but only you Christian workers can give them love. And love is what they need. You can lift them, we can’t.” Another tribe of 150,000 has the largest murder rate of the world, and there is no Christian work among them. Of them a non-Christian government official said, “They are this way because they have no one to love them.”
Dear Lord, teach me the secret of faith and love, the alternate beats of the Christian heart. My faith draws love from Thee, and my love expresses that faith in love to everybody, including myself. May my life this day be an expression of faith and love. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Love shall be the manifestation of my faith.
