Some of the Weightier Commands. Chapter 28. Love. The Greatest Commandment. The only reward love seeks is someone to love. If you are looking for someone else, it is not love. Bernard of Clairvaux. When Christ is everywhere, wrath and hatred will be nowhere. William Law. Love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self. George MacDonald. Did you know that it's possible to escape this mortal life before we die? It is, although not in an absolute sense.
To the extent that we learn to love as God loves, to the degree that love completely takes hold of us and becomes the dominant force in our life, to this extent we can escape this mortal life and all that is attached to it. God is seeking true children, sons and daughters who love as He loves and who love the things He loves.
Jesus tells us, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40. Loving God and loving our neighbor are not only the two greatest commandments; they are all of God's commandments combined.
When we have fulfilled the two great commandments, we have fulfilled all of God's commandments. What does it mean to love God with our whole heart, mind, and soul? For one thing, it means that we keep His commandments. "He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." John 14:21. Is it possible to keep God's commandments without loving Him? To an extent.
Obviously, if we don't love God, we're missing the greatest commandment of all. However, we can keep many of the lesser commandments, particularly the external ones, without truly loving God. The Pharisees did that. And as we've discussed, love is not the primary force behind fear obedience and dutiful obedience. Scottish minister Henry Scougal describes our love for God this way: "Love for God is a delightful and affectionate sense of the divine perfections.
It makes the soul surrender and sacrifice itself wholly unto Him. It desires above all things to please Him. It delights in nothing so much as to be in fellowship and communion with Him." Love of God means we're ready to do or suffer anything for His sake. The Victorious Cycle. Love is one of the greatest forces of the victorious cycle. Without true love, love of God and our neighbor, our prayers will be greatly hindered.
As one author put it, "We cannot be wrong with man and right with God." If we harbor hatred toward our fellow man, to a large degree all we are doing on our knees is pretending to pray. Andrew Murray observed, "A loving life is the condition of believing prayer." If we are disobedient to the two great commandments, it means very little that we obey a hundred of the lesser commands. Without love, the kingdom life is impossible. But what is love? To answer that question, we need only to look at Jesus and His Father.
Greatest Love Story of All Time. The eternal love between the Father and His Son is the deepest, greatest love story of all time. Their love for each other eclipses any love that has ever been felt between two humans. Christians have written tens of thousands of books containing millions of pages about Christ's love for us. Poets and composers have written thousands of hymns about this same love. Yet few books or hymns have ever been written about the deep love Christ and His Father have for each other.
Nevertheless, it was that love which sent Jesus on the most marvelous voyage that has ever been taken, or ever will be taken, in the history of the universe. That voyage brought the eternal Son of God from heaven to earth to be born as a human and to die a horrible death. To be sure, Jesus did this because He loved us. Yet He did so even more because He loved His Father. If it had not been His Father's will, Jesus would have never come to earth. Jesus' entire delight, focus, and life is in His Father.
He loves not only His Father, but His Father's ways, His purposes, and His commandments. He constantly thinks of His Father, and He continually talks to His Father. As Jesus told His disciples, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work." John 4:34. Jesus is the kingdom life taken to perfection. Just as His Father is the joy of Jesus' life, so Jesus longs for His Father to be the joy of our lives.
After the Last Supper, Jesus tenderly prayed to His Father about us, "That they all may be one as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me, I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one, I in them, and You in Me, that they may be made perfect in one." John 17:21-23. Jesus wants us to experience the profound happiness He knows in His Father.
One of the tragedies of Christian history is that this love of Jesus for His Father was largely forgotten in Roman Catholic teaching and replaced by Jesus' supposed obsession with His earthly mother, Mary. I have no doubt that Jesus loved His earthly mother in a special way, but it was not Mary that He talked about endlessly. It was always His eternal Father.
In fact, when His disciples told Him that Mary and His siblings were waiting to talk to Him, Jesus stretched out His hand toward His disciples and said, "Here are My mother and My brothers, for whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." Matthew 12:49-50. So Jesus made it quite clear where His heart's greatest affection lies. It is not toward Mary; it is toward His Father. Did you notice that He said His mother and brothers are those who do the will of My Father in heaven?
He could just as correctly have said, "My mother and brothers are those who do My will." But no, He used that opportunity, just as He used so many others, to draw attention to His Father, whom He loves so dearly. The Father's Love for Jesus. Does the Father feel the same way toward Jesus? Absolutely. His greatest joy is His Son. He delights in honoring and elevating Him. He showers His Son with gifts, powers, and distinction. As Jesus said, "All things have been delivered to Me by My Father." Matthew 11:27.
The relationship between the Father and the Son is so close that Jesus could say, "No one knows the Son except the Father." Matthew 11:27. The Father loves His Son so much that any friend of His Son's is automatically a friend of the Father. Jesus assures us, "He who loves Me will be loved by My Father." John 14:21. It's hard to imagine the unspeakable anguish the Father felt watching His Son being humiliated and dying in agony.
Almost all earthly fathers would rather die or suffer than have one of their children do so, particularly before their eyes. How much more so a divine Father? I have no doubt that the darkness that followed Jesus' death was the Father's outpouring of grief at what had happened. There are few passages of Scripture more tender than the words Jesus spoke at the moment of His arrest. "Do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide me with more than twelve legions of angels?" Matthew 26:53.
I had read that passage hundreds of times, seeing nothing in it beyond the fact that Jesus was going to His death willingly. However, one day while reading it during my devotional time, the full importance of what Jesus said suddenly hit me, and I found myself getting choked up. Think about Jesus' words for a moment. The Father and Son had planned Jesus' incarnation and death before the world was even created.
Yet Jesus told His apostles that if at the last moment He had found that He was not able to go through with it, His Father would have instantly intervened to save Him. I'm not saying that the Father would have abandoned us. He surely would have found another way to redeem us. But He was not going to let His beloved Son suffer unwillingly for even one second. Jesus only had to say the word, and twelve legions of angels, over sixty thousand angels, would have instantly been at His side.
That's how precious Jesus is to His Father. Learning to Love Like God. The intense love the Father has for His Son in no way diminishes the love He feels for each of us. Love does not become diluted when it is shared among many people. Jesus says that the Father loves faithful Christians just as He loves Jesus. John 17:23.
William Law describes God's love for us in these words: "You are as much in the care of this great God and Father of all worlds and all spirits as if He had no earthly children but you, or there was no creature for Him to love and protect but you alone. He numbers the hairs on your head. He watches over you, sleeping and waking. He has preserved you from a thousand dangers that you nor I know anything about." When we love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we won't harbor any mean or hurtful thoughts toward them.
We would rather suffer a thousand wrongs from them than to ever wrong them ourselves. We rejoice in the blessings and righteous successes of our neighbors as if they were our own personal joys. We feel their hurts as if they were our own, and we object to any evil that befalls them. We frequently pray for their happiness, health, family, and spiritual well-being. Loving our neighbor as ourselves means more than just having feeling and compassion for one particular neighbor or friend.
It means we have such earnest feelings for all our fellow humans. William Law describes such a pervasive spirit of love as follows: "The spirit of love does not want to be rewarded, honored, or esteemed. Its only desire is to propagate itself and become the blessing and happiness of everything that needs it.
And therefore it meets wrath and evil and hatred and opposition with the same one will as light meets the darkness, only to overcome it with all its blessings." When love is the spirit of your life, it will have the freedom and universality of a spirit. It will always live and work in love, not because of this or that, here or there, but because the spirit of love can only love wherever it is or goes or whatever is done to it.
You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them, especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to you or contradictory to your state or mood or occurrences in life. But the spirit of love is not in you till it is the spirit of your entire life, until you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it. Surrendering our entire lives to love does not come easily or happen overnight. For most Christians, it comes gradually with lots of setbacks.
Yet through the power of Christ, the spirit of love can control our lives. Loving Our Brothers and Sisters. Among the other things that Jesus prayed for after the Last Supper was, "That the love with which you love Me may be in them." John 17:26. Incredible. Jesus wants Christians to have the same marvelous love toward each other that the Father has for Him. What would be the result if Christians had that kind of love for each other?
Jesus explained, "That they all may be one as you, Father, are in Me and I in you; that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent Me." John 17:21. If we truly had God's type of love for each other, then we would be able to be one. What did Jesus say the result would be? He said the world would believe that God had sent Jesus. Does the world believe that God sent Jesus to earth? No. And one reason they don't is that they don't see God's love among professing Christians.
They see Christians bickering and arguing with each other. They have seen professing Christians imprison, murder, torture, and burn alive other Christians over doctrinal disputes. They have seen Christians slaughter one another over religious, political, and national issues. We, non-resisting Christians, shouldn't pat ourselves on the back and imagine that the world doesn't see the bickering and disunity among us.
I've met thousands of non-resisting Christians who are more than willing to turn the other cheek when it comes to war or personal revenge. They would gladly accept death rather than kill or hate their enemy. However, those very same Christians often find it difficult to love a brother or sister who holds different views than they on theological issues, church practices, or applications of biblical principles. Somehow they can love their enemy but not their own brother.
Is that what Jesus had in mind when He said, "Our love is to be perfect"? If you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same. And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so. Therefore, you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect. Matthew 5:46-48. Jesus said the tax collectors greeted their own brethren. Where does that put us when we refuse to do even that?
Perhaps we're worse than the tax collectors. At least they loved each other. The simple truth is that it's usually much easier in practice to love our geopolitical enemy, whom we can't see, than it is to love our brother, whom we can see. John Wesley noted this about the Protestant or Evangelical churches of his day. Protestant churches, too, know how to persecute when they have power in their hands, even unto blood. And meanwhile, look how they also anathematize each other.
They devote each other to the nethermost hell. What wrath, what contention, what malice, what bitterness is everywhere found among them, even where they agree in essentials and only differ in the incidentals of religion? Love is definitely one of the essential keys to the kingdom life. But there's another important quality we need to possess: humility.