We use one word, love, for a dozen different things. Jesus points us to the highest kind of all, agape, and it can only grow in a heart that has first been loved by God.
When a lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, He gathered the whole law into two sentences: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two, He said, hang all the Law and the Prophets. So the center of the Christian life is love. But that raises a question we rush past too quickly — what kind of love did Jesus mean? Because we use one small word for a hundred different things, and most of them are not the love He was talking about at all.
The love at the heart of the gospel is the highest kind: unconditional, unmotivated, spontaneous, outflowing love. It has nothing to do with what is in the object of the love and everything to do with the one doing the loving. To see how high that is, it helps to walk up the ladder from the bottom.
The Lower Loves
The first rung is utilitarian love — self-love in disguise. When we say 'I love cheesecake,' we only mean there is something in it that pleases us. Take the pleasure away and the love evaporates. Sadly, many of us love people this way: we love those who treat us well, speak kindly to us, and are there for us, and the moment they can no longer do those things, we quietly stop. The problem is selfishness. You do not really love the cheesecake; you love what it does for you. And self-love sits at the root of every sin, because it turns people and things into tools for meeting our own desires.
The second rung is romantic love. It is a step up, the love we see in the movies — boy meets girl, something about the other person draws you in, and you feel you could give yourself completely to them. It is beautiful, but it is still tangled up with self, because it is the attractiveness of the person that pulls you and the feeling that keeps you. The third rung, a mother's love, climbs higher and more selfless still — it is the love God points to when He asks, 'Can a mother forget her nursing child?' Yet even it has limits. It is her child. Would the love be the same for a stranger's child? The fourth rung is the love of friendship — people bound together by shared interests and a shared view of the world. It reaches further than the others because it can hold many people at once, and building this kind of genuine friendship is one of our deepest goals as a church. But be honest: even friendship carries a hint of self-interest, resting on the benefit we get from one another.
The Highest Love
So what love was Jesus pointing to? Agape — unconditional, unmotivated love for another that brings no benefit to you at all. He says the greatest commandment is to love God this way, and to love your neighbor this way: to worship God and spend time with Him for no reason other than that you love Him, and to love your daughter, your husband, your colleague, your pastor in exactly the same way. If you can raise your love to that level, you become the most powerful and influential person in your community, because you are living and acting like your Father in heaven.
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
Matthew 5:44
Why does Jesus set the bar there? Because that is exactly who God is. 'God is love,' John writes — agape love. God does not save you because of anything He stands to gain from you. He does not give you your next breath because you prayed hard enough today. His love reaches the ugly and the beautiful, the rich and the poor, the up-and-in and the down-and-out, the one who is easy to love and the one who is your enemy. And where does a love like that come from? It comes from God Himself. It is the evidence that He lives in you.
The greatness of agape is that you love a person for their own sake, and ultimately because God loves them. That makes it all-inclusive. The person may be beautiful or plain, tall or short, rich or poor, up-and-in or down-and-out. They may share your background or be a total stranger to it. Love like that even reaches your enemy — and Jesus says when you love your enemies and pray for those who mistreat you, you are acting like children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. If you only love those who love you, He asks, what reward is that? Even people with no interest in God manage that much.
That is the test John presses on us. If all you love are people who benefit you, or people you find attractive, or your own family, or those who like you back — then we cannot be sure God dwells in you. But if you can love someone unlovely, love without a thank-you, even love someone who is mistreating you, then there is real evidence that God is in you and you in Him. Why? Because the only way anyone can love like that is that they have first been loved like that themselves — loved while they were still unacceptable, with nothing in them to earn it.
Love Fulfills the Whole Law
Jesus and Paul both say that if we love this way, we will keep every commandment. Walking in this love crucifies the selfishness that produces so much of our sin. No one who genuinely loves his wife and children with agape love goes out to betray them — and if he does, it was never love in the first place, only self-seeking wearing love's mask. You cannot stay permanently angry with someone you truly love; if you are, it is usually because your resentment is feeding something in you. So Paul's counsel is simple and radical: walk in the Spirit, and you will not carry out the cravings of the flesh.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23
Falling from Grace
There is a warning tucked into Galatians that most of us read backwards. We assume a person falls from grace when they commit some scandalous, obvious sin. But that is not how God defines it. You fall from grace when you start doing something in order to earn God's love or acceptance. In Galatians it was circumcision; today it might be, 'You must dress a certain way,' or 'You must pray three times a day.' Whenever you make a rule the basis on which God accepts you, Scripture says you are now obligated to keep the whole law — and the moment you need the whole law to be accepted, you have slipped from grace. If you feel you are okay before God because of anything you have done, then Christ cannot be your Savior.
This is of the utmost importance, because the thing God most wants to break in us is the power of self. And the one force strong enough to destroy self is this divine love — agape, the unconditional acceptance of another. How do we come to walk in it? By letting the Holy Spirit constantly remind us that Jesus did it for us first, when we deserved nothing. Faith, hope, and love remain, Paul says, and the greatest of these is love. Understand what it is a chapter earlier: patient and kind, not envious or boastful, not easily provoked, keeping no record of wrongs, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. That is not merely a standard to admire. It is the very character of the God who loved you first, waiting to flow out of a heart that has been filled with His Spirit.