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How can we grow in loving others and God?
“And you shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: You shall love your neighbor
as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (ESV, Mark
12:30-31). We are created by God to receive love and give love. We can experience
God’s love and we can love God. Likewise, we can receive love from others and
we can love others too. This is the very foundation of Christian life which
will be explored in this paper.
God is love
God is love. He loves us with His
everlasting love (Jer.31.3). God’s love is steadfast, everlasting and
unconditional. God’s love manifested to us when Jesus died for sinners (1John
4:9). God’s love is self-sacrificing, self-giving, unconditional and
unchanging. God’s love for us is portrayed in Luke 15 in the story of a loving
Father who ran to his homecoming son with compassion, embraced him, kissed him,
gave him a new dress and prepared a great meal for him. He forgave his son’s
sin and accepted him unconditionally. God is full of love, mercy and grace
which He shows to the undeserved.
God loves us and we can experience God’s love
God has given us a capacity to experience
God’s love deep within our heart. God loved us first when we were enemies of
God (1John 4:19). God lavished his love over us (1John 3:1). God has been
pouring this great love into your heart through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). We can
feel it, experience it, know it and grow in it. Being open and sensitive to the
Holy Spirit will help us to allow the Holy Spirit to pour more of God’s love in
us. Moreover, Paul encourages us in Eph. 3.14-19 to pray that God’s love may
increase in our heart. Paul says here that Christ dwells in us as the Spirit strengthens
our inner man. As a result, we will be rooted and
grounded in love - the self-giving, unconditional, sacrificial love, even to
one’s enemy. Root and foundations play a key role in the sustenance of a tree
and building respectively. If the root or foundation does not go down, the tree
or building will not go up tall. If the root and foundations are not strong,
storms will destroy them. The foundation and root of Christian life is love. We
may not grow in Christ beyond the way we are able to love others with agape
love. As Christ indwells in us, we would grasp how wide, long, high and deep
the love of Christ. This shows the vastness of Christ’s love. Phrase “love that
surpasses knowledge” means that “it is so great that one can never know
it fully. We can never plumb its depths or comprehend its magnitude. No matter
how much we know of the love of Christ, how fully we enter into his love for
us, there is always more to know and experience” (O’Brien, 244). As we
grow in this love, fullness of God will fill us in greater measure. To have
more God in us, we need more of love in us.
Love God, not religion
The greatest and the first commandment of
God is that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
Jesus asked Peter three times that “Do you love me?” This is the heart of God
for everyone – we should love God. Intensity of this intimacy and love is
revealed when God calls us as His son, friend, bride and brother. We are
expected to be a lover of God.
To love God, we need to nurture a heart
that longs for God like the Psalmist (Ps.42) – a heart that is passionately
seeking, longing and thirsting for a face to face experience with God (v.2). As
we develop such a heart, we would choose to find time to sit at the feet of
Jesus like Mary (Luke 10:39). Spending time with Jesus in private becomes more
enjoyable and the best part of our life. Further, we will give our precious
things to Jesus wholeheartedly like Mary who anointed Jesus with the costly oil
(John 11:2). For Mary, Jesus was her supreme value.
As we
grow in loving Jesus, we develop a strong intimacy with God. Jesus becomes
everything in our life. We would value Jesus more than his blessing, our
ministry or anything else. As we grow in intimacy with God, our life will be
saturated with the thick presence of God. As we encounter God’s presence so
intimately, our heart will be continuously renewed and transformed. We will become
more like Jesus and the fruits of the Holy Spirt manifest in us greatly. We do
not need to strive for it, they just manifest.
God is interested in a loving relationship
with you, not in a religion. Religion is all about doing spiritual things
without a heart to heart relationship with God or a face to face experience
with God. David reflected about this in Ps. 51.16-17 (ESV): “you will not
delight in sacrifice...you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a
broken and contrite heart…” Jews searched for the eternal life in scriptures
but they did not search for Jesus, the source of eternal life (John 5:39-40).
Likewise, we should not replace a heartfelt intimacy with God and the love of
God with performance-legalism oriented spiritual activities.
Love Others
The second greatest commandment of God to
us is to love others. We must love one another (1Jn. 4.7). If we do not love, we
do not know God who is love (John 4.8). As we abide in love, we abide in God (1Jn.
4.16). God asks us to love our wife, children, parents, enemies and everyone.
God wants love as the foundation of all our relationships.
To nurture love for others, firstly, fill
your heart with God’s love and intimacy with God. This brings tenderness to our
heart. It increases our capacity to love others and build an intimate
relationship with others. Lief says that “You receive love, become love, and
then release love” (Lief, Kindle Edition). We need to receive God’s love into
our heart to release love to others. Secondly, keep switching on love and stop
switching off love. Bitterness, hurts and unforgiveness can switch off love in us
and destroy our capacity to love and develop intimacy. The path to switch on
love especially in hurting situations: “Love is patient and kind; love does not
envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but
rejoices with the truth. Love bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never
ends” (ESV,1 Cor.13:4-8).
Conclusion
God is love. He loves us so much. He
expects us to love him and also love one another. Without love, what we have is
not a gain (1Cor. 13.3). Love is eternal and greatest of all. Love is the
bottom line of everything, including our Christian life and ministry. God calls
us to build a kingdom of love – families, churches and relationships filled
with love. We will be able do this only when we are filled with God’s love
within us and also able to love God by constantly laying down our life for God
and others (John 15:13).
Work Cited
Hetland, Leif. Called to Reign: Living and Loving from a Place of Rest .
Convergence Press. Kindle Edition.
O’Brien, Peter. The Letter to the Ephesians. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans,
1999.
Further readings in this blog:
A book about love that I like:
Other further resources (not endorsing):