Only in Word
If you listen to people talk today, Christianity has been perfected. It seems like everyone is talking about love and often as if it is the ultimate good! We’re also regularly reminded that God is love. Therefore, everyone believes God to be the foremost good and the most important priority in a person’s life, right?
Sadly, the reason “love” is so often discussed but yet seems to be in so little supply is because the word has been emptied of meaning. Enjoyment is often called “love” (I.E. “I love this movie!”). Flattery, because it puffs people up, is often considered “loving”. Even lust is called “love”! The word is carelessly slung around, but the act is sorely missed.
Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
1 John 3:18
It’s easy to talk about love or to “love” things which benefit us. However, that’s not what God means at all when he speaks of love. His kind of love is honest and active. We don’t love entertainment. We’re not loving those whom we puff up (actually, the opposite). It’s not love to be sexually attracted to another person.
Sacrificial Love
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
1 John 3:16
God’s love is a sacrificial love. His eternal plan was always to humble himself and at the right time come into his own creation. Taking the form of a servant, he lived in perfect submission to the Father despite the temptations we have at every side to sin in this fallen world. Then, he suffered death at the hands of sinful man. Why? Because it was the best way to redeem his people from their own sin!
Likewise, we are called to lay aside blessings in our own lives and even our life itself in order to serve God’s people.
Don’t Close Your Heart
But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?
1 John 3:17
When God has blessed you with stewardship over anything (finances, time, skills, etc…) it is an opportunity to use that perishable good for imperishable wealth in the Kingdom. When we know a fellow believer is in need of something, and we could provide for that need, and yet do not, we are not loving as Christ loved.
We are not loving the way God loved unless we keep our hearts open to needs of our brothers, when we count their needs as if they were our own and seek to fill that need with that with which we, first, had been blessed.
While the world’s “love” is a lot of talk and self-serving pursuits of pleasure or position, God’s love is others focused and humbling. If the Creator of everything can humble himself and give even his own life to meet the needs of sinful man, those who have been saved from our sin ought always to be ready to surrender position and possessions to meet the needs of those people for whom our savior died.
