Without love we are absolutely nothing

Geoff ThomasToward the end of his ministry the Lord was facing the cross and the grave and the ascension. He was going to leave his disciples, and so he exhorts them to love one another. Love is the most important Christian grace by far; it is always listed in first place in the New Testament, and love is going to give the greatest credibility to evangelism. Nobody is going to be saved without love. This is what the Lord Jesus says, My children, I will be with you a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come. A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another (John 13:33-34). This is the distinguishing mark of the Christian, however old or young he is, in whatever century he is living, or whatever part of the globe. This is to characterise every child of God until the Lord returns, and then forever, because heaven is a world of love.

Do I do what my Lord says? Do I love him? Then I will keep his commandments and one of them is to love my fellow Christians as Jesus loves them. Isn't this what my Lord commands me to do? If I'm not doing that, then why not? Isn't it a great sin not to obey Jesus Christ? You say that it is hard. Did our Lord say that the Christian life would ever be easy? Loving others is never easy and this is why we are strengthened by the might of God's Spirit in our inner beings, in order to love like that. God's resources enable us to fulfil God's commandments, so we can't plead the difficulty of loving because we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. However, there are other exhortations to love which are just as awesome, perhaps more so. We are to love sinners as God the Father loved the world when he gave his only begotten Son for it. When I see a group of noisy half-drunk men sitting on a bench in the middle of town, and they're passing a bottle around, what is my initial reaction? Is it one of love for them? If it's sniffy disapproval of them then I am exactly like the people of the world who've never known the mercy of God? Do I think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’? Do I say a silent prayer for them, and is there a sadness in my heart? Even when people are smelly, even when they are hurtful, we are to love them in such a way that no sacrifice is too great and no kindness is too extravagant. I'm not talking about giving them money; something far more challenging, loving those people who will live for ever. Young Christians are a rebuke to us the way some of them love street people.

We are to love as God the Father loves God the Son. Before love ever existed in mankind it existed in God, in the love of the Father for the Son and the love of them both for the Holy Spirit. We are to love our fellow Christians with the same divine love. Where in the New Testament are Christians told to love like that? It is found in the prayer of our great High Priest Jesus Christ; he says to his Father that the love you have for me may be in them (John 17:26). That is even more searching. Do I love other believers in my town the way God the Father loves God the Son? If not why not? If God out of his great fulness has poured into me his own love - and he has done that to every Christian - then why am I not loving with that same love?

Let us examine the most comprehensive definition of love to be found in the New Testament in I Corinthians chapter 13. The chapter begins with Paul saying that love is more excellent than the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, and that all that can be done or suffered - for example, what a suicide bomber does – it is utterly vain without love. Then he begins to define love in the fourth verse;

 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres (I Corinthians 13:4-7).

No one is going to hear those words and say, ‘Right on . . . OK . . . we do that . . . now what?’

We hear these exhortations to love our fellow Christians as Christ loves them, and love men as the Father loves the Son. Then we read I Corinthians and we are profoundly challenged as to what kind of Christians we are. ‘Am I taking seriously, with Judgement Day honesty, my obligation before God to love in this way? Has the need to love become an obsession for me?’ We read something challenging on this theme, for example, Jonathan Edwards' ‘Charity and its Fruits,’ and we talk about the demands of Christian love to one another. Then I stir things more by preaching about love, and you listen intently as you always do, and we pray about it, and things like this happen in order for us all to do it, in other words, to love effectively and growingly. We want to serve God not only with our lips but with our lives. We want to count for Christ, and what matters to us more than love? We are foolishly tempted to start a new movement to encourage Christians to love, a crusade to stir up Christians to love, a convention to inspire love, a website . . . to love, a publishing house . . . to love, a magazine . . . to love, a television network . . . to love. Things like that have been started - to encourage revival, or to study the second coming, or to evangelise, or to publish the Puritans, or to stir up interest in the gifts of the Spirit - they all seem so secondary in comparison to this, to help Christians to love with the love of God. We will rather make love the theme of our whole ministries.