The Devastatingly Immense Call to Love People (And How To Do It) - Part 1

Despite all the love songs and love stories and love poems that have filled our culture, the culture is still no closer to knowing what love actually is.  You can’t change blindness by talking about seeing. The aforementioned songs, stories, and poems have only hardened people into a kind of love that is not actually true and glorious love.  Self-seeking human nature stays snuggly tucked away just under the surface of a good melody, a good narrative, and a good turn of phrase.  

Sadly, the church has not avoided the contagion of faulty, self-seeking love.  This is a problem not only for the church, but also for the culture. The only way our culture will actually see what love is, is to see it in people who can actually do it.  The only people who can love with true love can only be the church of the living God because those who are outside the church cannot truly love. It is impossible for the natural man to love like this.    

But what is it that makes this love impossible?  Let’s remind ourselves what the Bible says about love.  This, by the way, will be devastating to the natural man.  In that devastation, we then need to see how it will ever be possible for God’s people to love like this.  

The simplest way to define love is to see the commands to love stated in the first and second great commands. 

Matthew 22:37–40 And He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 “This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” 

So, true love first begins with love toward God, and from the overflow of that comes love toward people.  And just to make sure you understand that love has to begin with love toward God before it can be love toward people, make note of this verse in 1 John. 

1 John 5:2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. 

With these realities in place, here is our definition: 

Love is the worship and obedience to God that overflows in joyfully and sacrificially doing what is best, in the best way, for the best purposes for another person. 

Anything less than this is sinful.  Any feature of this that is cut short or left deficient is a love that is undermined by selfishness.  

And let me make one more note about the necessity of loving God before love toward people can truly happen.  Hopefully you noticed the three instances of the word “best” in the definition. Love for people means doing what is truly and actually best for people in all of those various features.  But how can you know what is best for a person? There is only one way. It is by knowing what God says is best. He is the all-knowing creator of people and so He alone knows this about all things and all people, which means you have to be worshipfully and humbly submitted to God and his word.  If you are not receiving from God’s word what God says is best for you and others, then you will never be able to love them as they need to be loved.  

Already we should be devastated.  Who would say they love God wholly and demonstrate it by always doing the best things for others?  However, the depth of the call to love goes deeper still…and the hope by which we can fulfill it. We will fill this out in the next post.