The Love that Isn’t

We cannot love others in order to win God’s love towards us. To the Biblically literate Christian this may seem like an obvious statement, one so integral to the message of the New Testament that it hardly needs to be stated. But, unfortunately, like other apparently basic realities revealed by the Word of God, this truth is hard for many a struggling believer in Jesus Christ to live out.

The Bible makes it clear that “We love because He first loved us” and that apart from Him we can do nothing. The implication is clear. We love others because we are loved by God and have received that love, not so we can obtain His love in the first place.

This is, of course, a variation on the theme of the futility of working for our salvation. It is a theme central to true Christianity. Our good works are only real, and only pleasing to God, if they come as a result of a saving relationship in Christ, a relationship that only His work on the cross makes possible. We do not work to become saved or stay saved. We work because we are saved, because the result of our being grafted into the true vine that is the resurrected Son of God is the fruit of good works.

This “fruit of the Spirit” is largely made manifest in the form of sincere love towards other human beings, the kind of love that often results in helping others in a personally costly way. Yet, despite the cost, this kind of helping is something we want to do. There is little or no sense of compulsion in doing it. If anything it is a joy. This is because the love of Christ inhabits us and fills us with love like His own. In some sense it then “overflows” out of us and onto others.

This seems so simple a concept. Our Lord and Savior is the vine and we are the branches. Branches do not toil to produce leaves and fruit; they do so because the vine to which they are attached provides the power for them to do so. So when a child of God truly loves he or she is acting as a vessel of the Supreme Lover. We love because we receive Christ’s love for ourselves, and that love is naturally extended to those around us, at least if we co-operate with God in being personally willing to love others.

It seems simple but actually living it out appears difficult if not impossible for many a professing Christian. Why? We must return to the unpleasant reality that our fallen nature, our “flesh”, is all about earning everything we need to survive and what is more needful to every human being than love, both received and given? Often added to our intrinsic tendency towards trying to “earn love” (which is a profound oxymoron, by the way) is damage we have received from other fallen beings who only loved us when we did something for their benefit.

The blessed hope for the person who has tried, and invariably failed, to love people in order to “make” God love them is the persistence of divine grace. Over time the genuine love of Christ can break through to gently convict the heart of one caught up in the futility of insincere, flesh-driven “love”. This may take time, even a long time but God has a way of bringing us to the end of our rope of self-effort. It is only then that we can become open to the love Christ freely gives. At that point we have a choice to allow this kind of love into our hearts of hearts or continue in the bondage of a truly loveless existence. By the mercy of our God may we all finally make the choice to receive the perfect and unconditional love made manifest on the cross of His only begotten Son….and then give it away.