Of all the ways that Jesus could have chosen to distinguish his disciples, he had to choose love? He could have chosen walking up a hill backwards, or drinking a concocted brew, or even paying an annual fee to help the poor. But no, he had to choose love.
Love is, well, sometimes hard to define. And when you do define it, it’s even harder to actual do.
I asked Sam, my 10-year-old nephew, the other day what it means to love. Love, Sam told me, is getting an ice cream with your nephew. He has a point. That’s what aunts do. But it got me thinking: how many ice creams is too many? When does getting an ice cream with your nephew stop being love? When does it become harmful to get ice cream with your nephew, even when he desperately wants it?
A guy who happens to be a pastor emailed me the other day in response to a controversial reel I created on Instagram. He started his message with: “Because I love you, will always be your friend, I chose not to hijack your feed….”. After straining through my memory bank, I finally placed the guy as someone I knew in college – over thirty years ago. What kind of love is this that endures thirty years without communication then surfaces to dump all manner of instruction and correction on my head?
So, what is love?
I don’t mean the romantic hyped-up Hollywood kind of love. I’m talking about the every-day Christian kind of love. What does it mean when Jesus told us that they would know us by our love? It seems the opposite is happening in our post Christian culture. The moment someone hears you’re a Christian they assume you’re a judgmental right winged hyper-conservative jerk.
And maybe you are. 😏
Because of this caricature of Christians, many who call themselves followers of Jesus have swung the pendulum of love to the other side. They’re the ones who were quick to give me an earful when I confessed on Instagram last week that I did not think it was Biblical to attend a gay wedding. It’s not that I’m against the LGBTQ+ community in general – just their weddings. But I got an earful from some nonetheless. They couldn’t believe how unloving my stance was. They, those self-proclaimed ambassadors of love, put me in my place. Love, they told me, trumps truth.
It’s about the nuances, I was told. We’ve got to weigh each situation and then show love according to what is needed in that instance. But perhaps we’re not as nuanced as we like to think we are. A good test of your level of nuance is how you react when others don’t agree with your opinions. Nuance, and love for that matter, is thrown out the window in those instances.
It is my observation as a Lebanese born American that when it comes to love, Americans make much of a wedding day while neglecting the marriage. Americans like to boil love down to one main event. But what happens after the wedding? Well... half of those weddings don’t make it past the 50-yard line, statistically speaking. Our love is fickle at best – we tend to put it on and remove it as fast as it takes to get out of our rented tuxedos.
It has also been my experience that the hardest people to love are my own people (i.e. other Christians). It’s been difficult for me to understand other Christians no matter how hard I’ve tried. Perhaps I’m to blame. I find that I’m guilty of the fickle kind of love when it comes to the Church. I make much of the wedding day while neglecting the actual marriage. Instead of placing great value on the daily rhythms of community, I’m quick to judge other Christians by how they show up on one day a week.
The older I get, the more I am aware I have a love handicap. I am a curmudgeon waiting for the Holy Spirit to transform me into a lover of people. My love meter is often dependent on my preconceived expectations and quickly squelched by the cynicism I’ve picked up from all the disappointments in my life.
Maybe I’m not alone in this. It seems we who call ourselves followers of Jesus might have a crisis of love on our hands. We need to learn what love is. This month here at Living With Power we’re going to focus on love, not because I want to but because we need it.
It’s ironic isn’t it, that the identity currency that Jesus gave his disciples is the very currency that those who oppose Christ and his followers have claimed as their own.
It should come as no surprise to us that Satan has usurped love and counterfeited it as his own. Whether it’s masqueraded as conditional, cocky and self-serving, or simply combative, love in our culture seems to belong to everyone but the Christians.
If we want to understand love, we need to start with Jesus – not the Jesus we imagine, or the one we’ve created based on our cultural whims and wants, but the Jesus of the Bible.
The same Jesus who wasn’t afraid to over-turn the tables of the religious leaders, but neither was he afraid to command sinners to go and sin no more.
Maybe it’s not ignorance we hold when it comes to love, but an awareness of the high cost it will take us to live this unconditional self-sacrificing kind of love that Jesus lived. But if we’re hoping to make a difference in this world, it’s time for us to reclaim love – not the nuanced culture appeasing love, but the truth based hard bold love that stands as a beacon of light in a culture that prefers the darkness.
It will hurt to love like that. It might even lead to a cross. It will certainly demand we die to some things. But remember that after the cross comes the resurrection.
Are you ready to love like Jesus did?
I’ve created a Love Challenge for the month of February. It’s not magic or a formula that will fix all of our love problems, but it’s a way for us to live in awareness of our need for Jesus to change us and to teach us to love. Will you take the February Love Challenge with me?
Share with others.
Maybe you need a reminder of God’s love for you. My new Bible study A Table in the Wilderness released TODAY and focuses on how God reveals His love and abundant goodness to us in life’s most unexpected places. If you’re in need of some good news in your life, if you feel empty, if life is hard, if you think God has forgotten about you, this Bible study is for you! You’re invited to the table.
If you were glad to receive this letter, share this post of Learning to Live with a friend!
Wow. Really thoughtful and convicting. So good. They will know us because of our love, huh? Thank you for this profound piece.