01.11 | By This
John 13:21-38
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:35
The hardest and greatest work of the Christian journey is love.
It is the hardest, for it is the most revealing, the most humbling, and the most costly. To love is to always work against the grain of our culture, against the grain of our ego, against the grain of our fears. It requires continual surrender of our programmes and priorities, our agendas and our intentions. To love is inconvenient, it is messy, it is costly, it is selfless. To grow in the way of love is a process of endless conviction to the vast extent to which our hearts have hardened from being ever open to the love of the Father. Growth in love is the sum of the Christian journey, and the intent of the discipling experience. Nothing will demand more of you, reveal more to you, or bring you to a greater wellness of soul.
And yet, it is also the greatest, for love was both the motive and meaning of our creation. Because He is love, He made us, and because He made us to be like Him, He made us to love. In His endless wisdom, He designed humanity to only function well when our lives are directed towards Him in joy-flooded love, and directed towards one another—in the kind of love that becomes unaware of self in the willed elevation of another.
Friends, let nothing distract you from this task in our transformation. Let nothing become greater to us. Let no desire—to be competent or impressive, to be articulate or able, to be prominent or successful, to be influential or powerful—become greater to us than the most essential requirement that we become endlessly more people of love. If you are to tread even one inch further on the discipleship road today, it will include going one inch further in the way of love.
Attend to the words of Love personified:
By this.
These two words hunt down our souls and whisper us back to the Way of Jesus, for so frequently do we wander from this essential calling. So often we find ourselves distracted by other aims that appear noble and good—to be a people of better communication, better music, better strategies, better programs, better budgets, or better buildings. And yet, in these two words Jesus tells us that the core command and yearning of the Father is that we become better people, which always means growth into a people of love.
Friends, take no discouragement. This is not condemnation. It is the great corrective of our direction, required every single day of our journey. For by this the world will know.
Hold this in your hearts. Imagine your community one year from now, were it to have grown in nothing more greatly than in love. To be more attentive to one another and to our cities. To meet one another with compassion that weeps and rejoices on the basis of the wellbeing of another above our selves. To view our possessions not as security and status for self, but as possibilities for the lifting of others. Who have slowed to be able to hear, to see, to look one another in the eyes with sparkling compassion. That the world may meet us, and find, in the outlandish measure of our love, that we are truly His disciples.
Reflect:
How do I return to the priority of growing in love today?
Pray:
Father,
You are
Love.
And thus,
Let me become so too.
Would you turn this soul from
Busyness, fear, shame, and anger;
From the endless whirring of attainment;
And the relentless cultivation of self.
Would you soften me,
In the atmosphere of your love,
Until I find my intended form—
In the form of Jesus Himself—
And my eyes sparkle
With the dazzling, weeping, laughing and rejoicing
Heart that thumps with the compassions of God.
That the world may know who we are,
As He is seen in us.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Ezekiel 3:15-6:14 | Proverbs 27:3-10