LOVE One Another

Generous LOVE that imitates and reflects the very character and heartbeat of God.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

If there is a single word in the English language that needs to be divided up into multiple words, it’s the word LOVE.

I LOVE pizza…and spicy Thai curry.

I LOVE the Portland Trail Blazers…and the game of basketball.

I LOVE beautiful, sunny autumn days…and the first snow in winter.

I LOVE to sing…and play guitar.

I LOVE my mother…and my neighbor.

I LOVE God…and my church.

I LOVE all these things…but not each in the same way.

We really need a different word to describe the LOVE of food and the LOVE of a family member.

We need more words.

One word that helps—although it’s not an English word—is found in the New Testament. This word is agape. Let’s take a look at this word in this video from the Bible Project:

Most people, even if they aren’t very churchy, have heard of the Golden Rule: Do to people what you would want them to do to you (Luke 31).

Some people might also be familiar with the words of Jesus, which have come to be known as the Law of Love or the Greatest Commandments — LOVE God and LOVE your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31).

And if you are or have been a church-goer, you might even remember that Jesus went way beyond God and neighbor (which includes your mother), instructing his disciples to

…LOVE your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven… If you LOVE only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.

—Matthew 5:43-48 (CEB, capitalization mine)

According to Jesus, it’s not enough only to LOVE God.

It’s not complete, not whole.

Even more, it’s not enough to only LOVE family and friends.

If this is your limit, you are still lacking.

Love your enemies — those people who are different than you, those with different values and beliefs, those who live very different lifestyles, and even those who oppose you and treat you poorly.

LOVE them, Jesus tells us. This is what it means to be a child of God. This is complete. This is whole. This is the full meal deal.

This adaptation of the classic hymn, Love Divine All Loves Excelling, reminds us that it is God’s LOVE that finishes this work in us—

(“Love Divine” — view below)

What did Jesus mean?

If you’ve ever come face-to-face with the confusion and difficulty of translating ancient texts (such as the Bible) across massive canyons of time, culture, and languages, then you understand that there are almost always variations, alternate translations, and sometimes things that cannot be known with certainty.

Here’s an example:

When Jesus told his followers, “Love your neighbor,” he quoted from the Old Testament, where the Hebrew word for LOVE is ahavah.

But Jesus was not speaking Hebrew. In Jesus’ Aramaic, the word is rakhmah (which is similar to the Arabic and Indonesian words for mercy and grace).

But the New Testament was not written in Aramaic, so the Greek word used was agape. So, as Jesus’ earliest disciples wrote and proclaimed the good news of Jesus they were taking ancient texts that had crossed cultures and centuries and redefining them by what they had seen and heard in their time with Jesus.

Jesus became the embodiment of the agape form of LOVE.

I cannot agape spicy Thai curry or even the beauty of God’s creation.

If I am to consider myself a child of God, I must learn to agape the people around me…all the people around me!

Some people want to ask the question, “Which is more important—loving God or loving my neighbor?” For Jesus, it seems, the two cannot be separated. If we LOVE God, it must leak out into how we relate with people. How we LOVE people (who are created in the very image of God) is part of how we LOVE and honor our Creator and God!

Have you ever noticed that the people who were nothing like Jesus liked being with Jesus? And Jesus seemed to enjoy being with people who were nothing like him?

He loved them.

For Jesus, agape LOVE is not warm-fuzzy feelings or a feel-good Hallmark movie.

Agape is a genuine LOVE for God and others that seeks people’s well-being without expecting anything in return, even toward those you can’t stand. It’s a generous love that imitates and reflects God's very character and heartbeat.

LOVE is as LOVE does

LOVE is a verb.

It’s a doing word…an action word…a walk-the-walk word.

Jesus did not find victory over sin and death by harnessing the power of military might, economic influence, legislative control…or even by utilizing cable news networks or a barrage of Facebook memes!

Nope.

It was LOVE — living out the things he talked about.

Serving and helping people in tangible ways.

Directing his gaze and his life in the direction of his heavenly Father.

Jesus found victory by harnessing the power of the upside-down-kingdom of God—by moving down and out toward the poor and hurting rather than up and in toward the centers of power and influence—by entering into the messy lives of people and showing genuine LOVE to those who were forgotten, ignored, and mistreated.

Then, on that Easter morning (pause)………yes, I know this is advent, and we are preparing our hearts for Christmas. Christmas is, we must remember, the first chapter of the Easter story………(unpause) Jesus and his followers claimed that it was the power of God’s AGAPE for the world that was revealed in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. As Paul wrote:

…God shows his LOVE for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

—Romans 5:8 (CEB, capitalization mine)

Or, in the words of John:

This is how the LOVE of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him…if God loved us this way, we also ought to LOVE each other.

—1 John 4:9,11 (CEB, capitalization mine)

So, being a Christian is a life of giving to others the same grace we have received…blessing our neighbors as we have been blessed…showing mercy in the same way it has been shown to us…and loving others, even amid their mess, just as Christ died for us in the midst of ours.

This is love…agape LOVE.

God’s call is for all to come.

Whomever you are…come.

Wherever you are…come.

Whatever your mess may be…come.

Christ is born! And he agape's you today!

(“O Come, All You Unfaithful” — view below)

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