The Devastatingly Immense Call to Love People (And How To Do It) - Part 2

In the last blog post I laid the foundation for biblical love and the impossibly to do it as an unregenerate person.  The first and second great commandments are the heart of the issue and I worked off of those to put together a definition of love.  That definition was as follows:

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

We should all be humbled to the dust in light of this.  None of us do this in fullness. Even believers, who can obey God, only love like this at times and in limited degrees.  

And yet the biblical call to love is not fully plumbed.  There is a progression of thought in John 15 which is stunning in its divine totality.  If you weren’t sufficiently humbled yet, these next verses should come over you like a steam roller.  

First, John 15:9 sets the stage: 

“Just as the Father has loved me…”

How has God the Father loved the Son?  We can’t really know this in fullness. It is infinite.  It is the limitless expanses of the Trinitarian love relationship of which we can only see the fringes.  

But then see the remainder of verse 9:

“Just as the Father has loved me I have also loved you; abide in my love.”

This is too much.  We are loved with the same divine, Trinitarian, infinite, and limitless love?  Though we can never know its depths, Jesus says it is ours for us to live in and frolic in forever.  

Now the bomb drops in verse 12:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another, just as I have love you.”

Now wait just a minute.  What was too wonderful to fathom has now become too ludicrous to tolerate.  If we are loved with a divine, Trinitarian, and infinite love, how in the world are we supposed to love anyone like this?  I am not divine. I am not some fourth member of the Trinity. I am not infinite. This must not be right.  

But it is right.  This is what we were created for. Though the fall has broken us to the core and made us deficient and warped at every level, we hear the divine design in this command.  The commands don’t lessen up simply because we are fallen. Instead, they make us all the more shocked at just how far humankind actually fell.  

How can this be possible, finite people loving with an infinite love?  How could this even be possible if we were perfected in heaven? I think we get a glimpse of that answer in the very words of Jesus as he expands on this command to love.  Jesus spoke about this same issue in the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew’s gospel.

In Matthew 7:12 we see the call to love, stated slightly different. 

“In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

Treating others the way you want to be treated is just another way of saying love them as yourself.  And the only way you do any of that correctly is if you first love God in worship and obedience. So we are back at the same command, only now we know just how deeply God intends this love to go.  He wants it to match His own love in height, width, length and depth.  

How, how, how?  That is the question.  And there is an answer.  It is all bound up in the word “therefore.”  Jesus has just spoken something, and verse 12 is the conclusion, the “therefore” that follows on the previous train of thought.  What is the thought? 

7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 “Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10 “Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? 11 “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! 

Verses 7-11 is all about how God provides.  All you have to do is ask, seek, and knock. All you have to do is look at what good fathers do.  In fact, even evil fathers normally provide for their children.  

So this is our answer.  God gives the very love he commands we show to others.  God intends to be the fountainhead and we the conduit. We ask God and he will show himself the all-sufficient giver.  And his perfect, never-faltering giving enables us to give, and give, and give what is best, in the best way, and for the best purposes to those around us.  We do not get the praise for this love because we are not the source. He is the source and we are the “therefore” that follows after.  

What an amazing thing this Trinitarian God has done.  He created us so that his love for the Son and the Spirit would spill over into us and through us to others and ultimately back to the God from which it came.  We have been caught up into a glory we have only begun to imagine. But the glimpses of it start now, as we are renewed through the gospel, and we love others as proof that God truly does indwell us.