“All you need is love.” I’m guessing there is no topic more represented in song, by a long shot, than ‘love’.
Everyone talks a lot about love and rightly so. For the Christian, the big two commandments are love God and love your neighbor. We speak often of showing the love of Christ.
But what does it really mean?
“I love my spouse” and “I love ice cream” use the same word, but are not even close to the same meaning. How do we define what love is? Many, and it seems to me the world at large, use the word ‘love’ to basically mean giving people a nice feeling of non-confrontational acceptance while meeting felt needs. A ‘meeting me where I am’ – and helping me be comfortable there with your understanding and empathy. Like Jesus did when he went, sat, ate, and had fellowship with hated, greedy tax collectors and sexual sin-filled prostitutes (which he did) and accepted them as such. He loved them as they are. He came to die for all of the sin and thus they are loved by him and free to go on as they were.
Except…that’s not the real Jesus as revealed in the Scriptures. That is not the ‘love of Christ’ revealed there. It’s what we all want because that definition of love will cost us nothing. Everybody will like us and feel loved.
But I need to get my definition of love from divine revelation. The number 1 person who will lie to me … is me. I need objective truth from my Creator, something outside of me. We all know the verses about sacrificial love that climax in the cross where Christ lays down his life. I’m going to take a different tact here, I want to go to the text and look for examples of Jesus loving his contemporaries during his years of ministry, especially those where the Bible explicitly tells me it’s an instance of Jesus loving someone – actual examples of the love of Christ apart from his death on a cross.
One example that comes to mind is in Luke 19. Zacchaeus, that ‘wee little man’ from the song we’re now all singing in our head. One of those hated, greedy, and in his case chief tax collectors. Jesus went to his house and had fellowship with him. The conversation is not recorded, but something absolutely miraculous happens between verses 7 and 8. Zacchaeus by verse 8 is in full repentance mode, ready to make restitution to all those he has wronged. A very serious question I must ask myself is this – is the extreme response of Zaccheus due to Jesus being all about loving acceptance for Zacchaeus as he was, a greedy tax collector? Or do we think Jesus may have spoken some rather clear and unpleasant truth to him, in love, and the Spirit created a new heart in him that could hear it? How else can you explain the total and completely unnatural turnaround in his attitude before and after that encounter? Speaking truth, in love, broke him and made him new. You do not go from a rich chief tax collector to giving half of all you have away on top of restoring FOURFOLD what you’ve defrauded others of, because someone ‘accepted’ you as you are and told you that in spite of the sin, you’re a pretty decent person. At best you’d fully restore to others what you’ve wrongly taken. Onefold. Fourfold restoration, far beyond what you’ve taken, is simply unexplainable aside from some massive heart change occurring. Something huge, way beyond ‘he loved me and accepted me as I was’ happened to this man. He absolutely was loved … and vastly CHANGED. Truth totally changed him. Jesus loved him enough to tell him the truth graciously, and gave him ears to hear it and respond.
Love is another of those small, powerful words. Turned Zacchaeus’ world upside down, for the better.
John 11 begins with Mary and Martha coming to Jesus to tell him Lazarus is sick and dying. John 11:5-6 is mind-boggling. Let the implications of the powerful little word ‘So’ sink in deeply.
“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”
It plainly says Jesus loved all three of them SO he stayed where he was 2 more days in order that Lazarus would die unhealed. This was on purpose. I need to contemplate that. Later in vs. 14, instead of avoiding or backtracking on this issue, Jesus doubles down on it:
“Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there.”
He’s…glad? I thought he loved them, but he let him DIE and was glad about it? What kind of absurd definition of love is that? Think for just a minute about the grief he put them through, not to mention the experience of physically dying for Lazarus. Grief at the death of a loved one is some of the hardest grief we can bear. Jesus is glad he put them through that, yet he said he ‘loved’ them. Huh? There’s a definition of love here that is not our own. What is ‘love’ that I learn from Jesus here? Well, it leads me to a definition that says real love is not “being nice and accepting” but pointing others to the truth and glory of who Jesus is. Love is helping others into and growing in a relationship with their Creator. Loving others is helping them see the glory of God, through truth. Lazarus was physically dying, well beyond having some felt need. Jesus loved them and so he purposefully let Lazarus die…because he knew this would show them more of himself and his glory when he resurrected him – they would much more clearly see Jesus for who he is by Lazarus dying – and THAT is his truly loving them. Love is showing others the truth of God and his glory – for their eternal joy. God’s definition of love is God-centered and truth-centered. That is so NOT the world’s definition or the definition of most Christians. However, “God is love” as he shows us…himself. For God so loved the world that he sent his Son…to reveal more of God and his glory to us. The glory of His grace displayed in Jesus (Eph 1). For God so loved the world he sent the apex revelation of His full glory. The exact imprint of His nature. Every action He took showed us God’s glory, full of grace and truth.
That is love…so loving my neighbor means something totally different than what we typically want it to mean. Our typical definition has much more to do with doing something for others so they feel good – and honestly so they feel good towards us as well. I have so often thought of loving others as doing something nice and sacrificial for them. It is that, don’t get me wrong, but to show the love of Christ is more than that. Atheists and others of all stripes do nice and sacrificial things for others all the time. If that’s all it is, there are a billion examples of where you certainly don’t have to believe in Jesus at all, you can be antagonistic towards Jesus in fact, and still love. But the love of God, the love of Christ, as defined and exemplified by him is something different, something more.
Here’s the hard part. Truly showing the ‘love of Christ’, as defined by Christ, will often cause the recipient to dislike if not hate us. Deep down, we want “love your neighbor” to mean “do something nice and be non-confrontational over truth about God to your neighbor so we’ll be accepted and liked.” Jesus, the apex of God’s love, came to earth and was hated for the truth about God, the truth that actually saves. Yet he showed the amazing grace and love of God in spite of our hatred of it and him for speaking truth. There is a unique quality to showing the love of God way above and beyond the way the world loves.
Another explicit example from Scripture where we see Jesus’ definition of love is the story of the rich young ruler. In Mark 10:21, right before Jesus literally says something he knows will sadden this man and send him away minus salvation, it says,
“And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor”.
Whatever real love and loving our neighbor is, it involves speaking truth and upholding Christ and his truth. Jesus explicitly loved this ruler, so he told him harsh truth – you already have a god – and sent him away sad and dejected. Can my definition of love include this? Can it include equal parts truth and grace? Many today would accuse Jesus of not being full of grace and love here – the man left sad, deflated, judged, conflicted about himself. That ruler felt anything but loved. That simply cannot be love. But my definitions must bend and bow before the one full of grace and truth. His word explicitly tells me this was Jesus loving this man.
These last two examples are, from the text itself, actual examples of Jesus loving someone individually. This IS actually the “love of Christ”, and so that common phrase may also need some redefinition. To many (and I’ve often viewed it this way), this is an emotional thing, particularly the pleasant emotions we leave in others and thus in ourselves. But in the case of Mary and Martha it left them deep in the throes of grief. With the rich young ruler, Jesus loved him and therefore left him greatly saddened and dejected by truth, confused, judged, torn, convicted…but these were literally stated examples of the love of Christ. This was Jesus loving. He hit the ruler with the rather harsh truth that until he was willing to dispose of his god of riches, he could not have the God of the Universe. Why? Because Jesus is much more loving than us – he is concerned with the person’s eternal state; whether they will live in joy without end – or not. To affirm someone in things that will lead to their destruction for the sake of making them “feel loved” now, is anything but love.
Here’s what I’m understanding about showing the love of Christ. It is not me showing my (often self-serving) love in the name of Christ, its me showing the love of Christ. That is a vital distinction. It’s Christ doing this same kind of love he showed above through us as a vessel. I’m pointing them not to my love, but to Christ’s love, and his is based on shedding the light of truth, often unpleasant truth, but truth that leads to true and eternal joy. It’s me as a servant speaking the truth about the actual love of Christ that died for sinners although they were filled with rebellion and hatred of him as the light. The love of Christ is him dying for them, for us, in our darkness, hating the light that he was. It is us speaking the truth, graciously and in true love, showing people the glory of the Son of God giving himself for the rebellious hearts in us all.
For a good bit of my life, I’ve had an erroneous idea of showing the love of Christ. I chalk it up to a heart of man-pleasing; the fear of man over and above the fear of God – so I’ve had a man-pleasing definition of love.
Lord, help me change my definitions.