So how's your love life?

So how's your love life? Do you love God? God says we are to love Him with all our heart, mind, body, soul and strength. But not only God; we are to love others. Those who are genuinely born of God not only love the Father, but the child born of Him. Thus Jesus gave His disciples a new commandment: we are to love one another even as He loves us (John 13:34 and 35). It would be time well invested to meditate on the ways He expressed His love toward us, toward others, even toward the one who would betray Him.

And what is it that keeps us from loving like this?

John, the apostle of love, tells us in his first epistle by way of a warning: "Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away . . ." (1 John 2:15 and 16).

Yet the world is so very present, isn't it? So alluring! So tangible! So appealing to our flesh, our ego, our desire to be, to attain, to "make it"! But you have to ask yourself, will it last? Is it worth what you pay in time, in energy, in relationships?

Ours is a culture of concupiscence—a culture that has infiltrated the church. We have a love of softness. We are told, "You deserve it! You earned it. You owe it to yourself to be good to yourself!" Oh Beloved, we hear it and we believe it. We have so loved softness that we have not endured hardship as a soldier of Christ. We have not disciplined ourselves for the sake of godliness.

And part of godliness is loving—as He loved—sacrificially, selflessly. Loving others not just with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. When we love His way, then we assure our heart before Him, and we have confidence in the coming day of judgment, because as He is in this world, so are we. They know we are His disciples by our love—His love unleashed in us to overflow on the world about us.

“If I have not love, I am nothing,” Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:2. Jesus said that the second greatest commandment, after loving God, is loving people. Indeed, if we “live a life of love” as God desires (Ephesians 5:2), we will naturally obey most of His other commands.