“God is Love.” – 1 John 4:8
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” – John 13:34-35
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…. Love your neighbor as yourself.” – Matthew 22:37-39
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” – 1 John 4:7-12
Advent is a time to slow down and remember that God is at work in the world to redeem it and make it good again. When we live in this hope, we recognize that God is the only one who has the power to redeem this world. We can let go of any fleeting hope others might offer us because we know that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Governments will come and go. Economies will rise and crash. We will continue to age and become weak. And cultures will continue to shift and develop. The only things that is constant is God. When we fully rest in this hope, we are free to love in the way God loved us.
Scripture is full of passages about love. The word itself takes on different meanings. Without getting into the weeds of the different forms of love, I want to look at the definition of love as defined by God’s action of love we are called to model. In the form of a baby, love entered this world to walk among us. Love is the blueprint for how we should live and the blueprint walking among us shows us how skewed our blueprints have become. When we stand next to love embodied, we see where the blurred lines of our lives need sharpening so we can build better.
When it comes to following Jesus, we tend to overcomplicate things. He simplifies it for us. Love God. Love others. And really, the second is a clarification of the first. You are going to show your love for God by how well you love others. I’ve found that when I stop to make a list of the people I hate, there isn’t really anyone on the list. I would be too quick to pat myself on the back and claim I’m living up to Jesus’s call to love God. The next temptation is to evaluate how I interact with others and assume that my lack of harshness means I showed love for them.
As you get to know Jesus through the Gospels and see how John sketches it out in 1 John 4:7-21 (not to mention Philippians 2:1-11), we see what love for others looks like. Jesus loved people where they were. He loved them fully. He allowed his love to invite them into transformation. Not everyone responded to that invitation but he loved them all the same. When hate put Jesus on the cross, love forgave them even in agony. Love is a profound response to others because hope rests in something other worldly.
We are free to love as Christ loved because we have our hope and rest in God. No one is a threat to us when our hope is in God. No one. Not one. When we rest in hope, we are free to love no matter what a person does or is doing to us. This kind of love is a muscle that must be worked out in community together so we can more perfectly go and love the world.
Spend some time in prayer asking God to reveal to you who you struggle to love the most. Ask that he put you in situations where you can love. Ask God to give you a different perspective of those people so that you can see where they are coming from in the world.
As you go throughout your day, pay attention to how you respond to groups of people, those in the media, etc. If you find yourself tensing up, calling people names (even in your head), or getting worked up over the actions of others, take these things as signs of the Spirit nudging you to lean into love and find God’s heart for those people.
When we stop to look at Jesus in the manger and see the cross in the distance, we realize that we are not called to love better than the world. We are called to love differently all together because love wins in the end.