On the Jesus Kind of Love

Luke 10: 25-28 MSG ²⁵ Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”  ²⁶ He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”  ²⁷ He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”  ²⁸ “Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 MSG  If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  ² If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Observation & Impact on Me

Some themes are consistent over centuries regardless of how the world changes (societal mores, advances in technology/science, across various cultures/traditions). People and their primary needs and goals are basically the same across the millennia.  We just adjust the “why/what/how” to fit the current times. Love is one of these constant themes and has so many dimensions and definitions, so many expressions.  Jesus emphasized that loving God and others was the right answer to gaining eternal life.  And then He told the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate the kind of love He meant – unselfish, sacrificial love – the kind He Himself was willing to give. 

In the second passage, Paul is talking to the church about how works done for any reason other than love are worthless.  Eloquent loveless words are just noise like the “creaking of a rusty gate”.  Miracles of power and faith worked without love gain nothing.  Great sacrifices, even unto death, without love get you nowhere in God’s kingdom.  How do we ensure that love is the driving force for all we do?  What kind of love are we asked to be the root of all our works in the name of the Lord?

Here is one Bernard of Clairvaux who can speak to us across the centuries. Bernard was monk born in the 11th century. He was Pauline in his intensity (fasting food and sleep until it damaged his health), his apostolic energy (founded 70 monasteries) and his influence (he advised the Pope). He wrote much on love and how true love, the love of 1 Corinthians 13, will humble us so He can be exalted.  He gives us 4 stages of love on the journey of developing a personal relationship with God, living daily in the sense of His presence, making what we do count for the Kingdom, through the kind of love that brings eternal life.

1. The love of oneself for the sake of oneself. Everyone starts here. Our reality without God is self-centered, focused on self-preservation and self-promotion.

2. The love of God for the sake of oneself. This is where we love God because He loves, cares, and does for us. This is where we begin when we first turn to God. We lay our needs before God and begin to learn to trust Him to be our source of provision, our defender, our refuge, our strength. It is a beautiful and necessary place on the journey. However, if our prayers always consist of only asking God to do something for us, to preserve us in blessing, the danger arises that our worship, praise and gratitude will depend upon God’s beneficial response.  Remaining here, we could come to believe that lack of blessing translates to lack of favor with God or even doubting the reality of our redemption and our value in Christ.  We need to travel on.

3. The love of God for the sake of God. This is where we realize that God has worth simply because of Who He is and not because of what He does for us. This is where our worship changes because of the revelation of joy and wonder of His love for us, how He gave us value by creating beauty in the world, by making us in His image, by giving Himself to redeem us. This beautiful place is where we accept that blessing, sacrifice, obedience, lack, loss and persecution may all be part of our faith basic training to make us ready and equipped to serve Him, be an integral part of His plan. Shouldn’t this be the ultimate, the final stage? Bernard says not so.

4. The love of oneself for the sake of God. This is when we accept that God molded, shaped and made us fearfully and wonderfully on purpose for a specific purpose and carefully placed us in the Body of Christ to fulfill His will and eternal plan. This stage is where we submit, saying “yes” regardless of the cost, becoming meek and humble, accepting that we are made by God’s own hand.  This is where we stop comparing ourselves to others, stop envying another’s gifting, stop weighing our physical abilities, characteristics, talents, skills, and resources on the world’s scales of achievement, performance, and possibility, stop questioning God’s wisdom on how He equips and uses us, accepting that the cost to us is worth the benefit to Him, and begin to seek God for how to glorify Him in our uniqueness while supporting and encouraging others in fulfilling their part.  This is the place of Jesus becoming man, Jesus in the Garden, Jesus under the whip, Jesus on the Cross.

Prayer

Lord, You are awesome, marvelous beyond description, gracious, merciful and almighty. You are worthy of all glory, honor and praise. You are love and Your eternal plan is to wield that overpowering, overwhelming love as a weapon until all evil has expended every weapon and effort of its own and been forever and completely defeated.  I pray that my submission and obedience will be complete and consistent, rooted in Your strength and faithfulness, never shaken by the fearsome possibilities of individual battles, never diminished by what may be suffered or lost. Teach me to be meek and humble, like Jesus, so that my service will be rooted in the Jesus kind of love, joyful and freely given and, in the end, judged faithful and good.  Make it so, Lord, in Jesus’ name.