Category: Love is …

Where is the Love?

In her book, Walking Away from Faith, professor Ruth Tucker identifies five broad categories of reasons for people losing faith.  They are:

  • Scientific and philosophical issues, particularly evolution and naturalism.
  • Biblical perplexities and higher criticism.
  • Disappointment with God regarding personal and wide-scale suffering.
  • Hypocrisy and lack of caring among leaders in the church.
  • Lifestyle and perspective, including homosexuality, feminism, secularism, and pluralism.

We have slowly been working our way through this list looking at biblical answers to these faith challenges.  On point one, we emphasized the unnecessary box we place our students in regarding the creation/evolution debate.  God is the author of all science and is not surprised or taken out of the picture by new discoveries, even in the field of old earth geology.  Does that mean God has nothing to say to us in Genesis chapter 1?  Heavens no!  Genesis 1 emphatically teaches that God created the world from nothing.  This point was very important to Moses’ audience at the time since they were surrounded by cultures that worshiped the creation – sun, moon, stars, animals, etc. – not the Creator God.

We continued through the list by showing that we often compound the challenge of biblical perplexities by insisting on rigid theological boundaries that are not that clear in Scripture.  In doing so, we remove the appropriate mystery of the Sovereign God and in its place set up confusion around apparently contradicting scriptures.  We also add to the perplexity challenge our young people face when we fail to teach them all that changed between the old and new covenants.

On point three, we emphasized the work of Satan, God’s arch-enemy, in perpetuating the flow of evil and suffering in this world.  The New Testament makes clear that while not God’s equal, Satan has been given rule, for a time, over our present world.  But Satan has a flesh and blood enemy opposing his rule, and that is us; Christ’s body on earth.  Jesus enlists us to join Him in “destroying the works of the devil” (I Jn 3:8).

We now arrive at today’s topic, point four, “hypocrisy and lack of caring among leaders in the church.”  Throughout these discussions I have tried to highlight the critical part our attitude plays in delivering these answers to our young people.  How we answer these challenges to faith – with love, humility, grace, and truth – can be just as important as the answers themselves.  Our attitude, as church leaders at all levels, is exactly under scrutiny in point four.

But I would like to broaden our discussion to more than just church leaders as I believe hypocrisy and lack of caring is a church-wide problem.  And, in my opinion, it all comes down to a fundamental lack of love.  We have elevated programs over relationships.  We have elevated knowledge over love.  We have elevated a preferred personality over the diversity of the body as God formed it.  We have elevated numbers over depth.  We have elevated leadership by the professional class unconnected to the body.  We have elevated things we can measure:  attendance, budgets, small group participation, number of staff, etc. over things we can’t measure:  faith, hope, and love.  And the greatest of these is love.

The only theme more prevalent throughout the New Testament than the provisions of the New Covenant is the theme of love.  From Matthew to Revelation, love is the heartbeat of the New Covenant message.  A heartbeat we will investigate over the next several posts.

Faith, Love, and the Watching World

In II Peter chapter 1, the apostle highlights some of the qualities of the fruitful life with the bookends of faith and love.  We wrote about faith last time.  Today, we want to concentrate on love.  Some writers see the list of II Peter 1:5-7 as a progression, starting with faith and continuing step-by-step through virtue, knowledge, self control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love.  In this view, love is the ultimate goal.  Whether this list represents increasing maturity in the Christian life or not, we do know from the rest of the New Testament that love indeed is our highest goal.

Jesus taught it in the two great commandments.  Paul taught it throughout his letters.  In the book of I Corinthians, Paul elevates love as the final answer to division in the church.  He drove home the point in I Corinthians chapter 13 with his eloquent defense of love trumps knowledge, love trumps giftedness, love trumps good works.  John taught it in the great book on love, I John, as the natural outflow of our becoming the literal children of God.

Francis Schaeffer, in his book The Mark of the Christian, calls love, not only the tie that binds but the final apologetic for the church before the watching world.  He built the book around two verses and their context.  “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13:35) and, “…that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that you sent Me.” (Jn 17:21).  Dr. Schaeffer goes on to conclude, “Love – and the unity it attests to – is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world.  Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are indeed Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.”

Finally, coming back to faith and love together, Pastor Dwight Edwards writes, “This combination [of faith and love] is what puts God on display most noticeably before the world – our radical dependency in an unseen God plus our extraordinary concern for other people (especially fellow believers).  Paul calls it ‘faith working through love.’ ” (Revolution Within).

To Love as God Loves

On more than one occasion in these posts, I have quoted Roberta Bondi from her book, To Love as God Loves.  This thin volume is billed as a conversation with the early church.  The conversation was a spiritual eye opener for me.  C.S. Lewis once observed that reading only modern books is like joining a conversation at eleven o’clock which began at eight, leaving us to wonder about the real bearing of what is being said.  To Love as God Loves is joining a conversation near its beginning.

Prior to the fourth century, the message of Christianity was clearly at odds with the pagan Roman Empire.  The dichotomy was so severe that many careers were closed to believers because they somehow entailed supporting, teaching, or depicting pagan mythology.  The distinction between being a Christian and being a good Roman citizen was striking and occurred at great cost to believers.  Their allegiance was to Christ alone.

When Christianity became the favored religion under Emperor Constantine, the blessing was mixed.  While persecution subsided, the result of a state religion was a loss of the Christian / citizen distinction and an influx of nominal Christians into the church.  Rather than seek reformation from within, many serious-minded believers responded to Christ’s discipleship call by forming monastic communities in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.

One of the founders of this movement was Pachomius.  While a pagan and young conscript in the Roman army, Pachomius and his company were trapped in a tower without supplies when he first encountered Christianity.  A group of Christians reached the confined troops with food and drink, and Pachomius was so impressed that he inquired about the group’s identity.  He was told, “They are people who bear the name of Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and they do good to everyone, putting their hope on him who made heaven and earth and us.”¹  Pachomius became a believer and dedicated his life to expressing the Christian message in terms of how he first encountered it; by loving others and becoming their servant.  He went on to start a series of what became the first of the desert communities up the Nile in Egypt.

The focus of these early monastic communities was learning to love as God loves.  The idea that the goal of the Christian life is love; it is not to acquire a set of personal qualities was the eye opener for me and I believe is supported by the big picture message of the New Testament.  Our modern bias often misses this point.  We think the desert fathers and mothers were focused on the spiritual disciplines for the disciplines sake and we equate their asceticism with an unhealthy distaste for all things physical.  When understood in context, their serious desire to reign in “the passions” was simply a pathway to loving as God loves.  Professor Bradley Nassif summarized the journey from ascetic rigor to love in the May 2008 issue of Christianity Today magazine this way,

“When practiced in humility, ascetic rigor results in greater love.  The monks fasted because they were hungry to love God more; they prayed because they wanted closer communion with God and neighbor; they contemplated so they could better fix their gaze on their divine spouse; they practiced silence because they wanted to hear God so they could speak and act more wisely to the people around them.  The end goal of every spiritual practice employed by the monks was love.”

Our spiritual forefathers found that love and humility were powerful weapons against our self-centered and casual view of discipleship.  We think of monks as isolationists, but these attributes were forged and practiced in a community setting.  May we follow their example in our own communities – families, neighborhoods, and churches – by learning to love as God loves.

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¹ Pachomian Koinonia.  Vol. One:  The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples.  Translation and introduction by Armand Veilleux.  Kalamazoo, Michigan:  Cistercian Publications, 1980.

Love Walked Among Us

I’ve written before about the nebulosity of love.  Love is easy to talk about in the abstract, harder to put into practice.  We understand love is the essence of God’s character, but how does that translate into love living in us?  We can extol love as the greatest of gifts, but do we lift love to that level in our relationships?

As in all things under the New Covenant, our new arrangement with God, the answer goes back to Jesus Christ.  In Jesus, love exemplified took on flesh.  In Jesus, love walked among us.  In Jesus, we have the fullness of love expressed in attitude and action.  And as Jesus reminded us over and over, His life of love was a reflection of the Father.

In Love Walked Among Us, author Paul Miller paraphrases Jesus’ statement in John 5:19, “I do nothing on my own.  I can only do what I see my dad doing.”  Mr. Miller continues, “We see this kind of dependence as unhealthy.  We prize independence and trusting ourselves, but at the foundation of Jesus’ life lies a childlike trust in God, whom he calls ‘Father.’  Jesus is not controlled by a rule book but by a relationship.”

At the center of this relationship is love.  Jesus took the love of the Godhead and extended it to us.  Both by showing us what love looked like during His earthly ministry and by the ultimate expression of love; dying in our place.  “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends, if you do what I command you.  No longer do I call you slaves; for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:13-15).  The kingdom that Christ ushered in during His first Messianic appearance among us is indeed the “kingdom of love.”

Again, at the center of this kingdom is a love relationship.  God instructs us to love not to reach some higher level of spirituality, moral perfection, or understanding.  God’s command to love, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (Jn 13:34), is inherent in who He is and who we are as His children.  Quoting again from Paul Miller, “Jesus interpreted life through the lens of his Father.  He didn’t say we should love our enemies because ‘that’s what love does,’ he said we should love because that’s what his Father is like.”

Love That Builds

Today we continue the theme of “love trumps knowledge” with a stop in I Corinthians chapter 8.  “Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge.  Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies” (I Cor 8:1).  In other words, while knowledge puffs up, love builds up.

In I Corinthians chapters 8 to 10, the apostle Paul writes about the “gray areas” of life in a Christian community, areas where sincere believers disagree about participation in certain events or practices.  A particular challenge to Corinthian believers was whether or not to eat meat sold in the market that was previously used as a sacrifice to idols.  Paul summarizes the knowledge argument for eating the meat in question saying, “Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one” (I Cor 8:4).  Basically, because idols have no intrinsic meaning (they are merely wood, stone, metal, etc.), eating meat sacrificed to idols is acceptable.  We are free to participate based on our knowledge about idols.

But knowledge is not the end of the story.  In verse 7, Paul continues, “However not all men have this knowledge; but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled” (I Cor 8:7).  These believers, coming from an idol worship background, are sinning against their conscience by their participation.  What is the knowledgeable brother who is not harmed by participation to do?

“But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.  For if someone sees you, who have knowledge, dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols?  For through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died.  And so, by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ” (I Cor 8:9-12).

The word “strengthened” does not mean that your participation as a “brother with knowledge” gives your weaker brother the freedom to join in.  Rather it means that your example has emboldened or empowered your brother to sin against his conscience.  In this way, the strong have become a stumbling block and sinned against their brother.

So how does Paul handle this challenge?  He concludes, “Therefore if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble” (I Cor 8:13).  This is what love does.  Love limits its freedom for the greater good of our brothers and sisters in Christ.  “Let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor” (I Cor 10:24).  Knowledge puffs up.  Love builds up.  Both are “up”.  But the lesser is focused on what we know and the greater on serving and edifying the body of Christ.  Truly, love trumps knowledge.