There’s hope!
I’m going to rely heavily on the Bible to speak for itself here, since I’m still so much in the process of figuring this out myself.
John 13:34 says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Remember back in part one, where I said that in his counterfeits, Satan always mimics God’s calling? That means there’s an original design for our lives. We see it here in John. We are called by Jesus to love one another as He loved us.
How did He love us? Well, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
So God has called us to lay down our lives for one another in friendship. He has called us to wash each other’s feet, to share our plenty with those in lack.
What do we do with these verses in light of our previous discussion? There seems to be a contradiction of sorts. Our purity is insufficient, yet God calls us to wash each other’s feet. Our sacrifices are ineffective, but God wants us to die for one another.
It seems like He wants us to have a love that isn’t even possible for us.
…Which is probably exactly right, now that I think about it. No wonder I keep encountering locked doors, places where my love can’t enter.
It reminds me of 1 Corinthians 13, the oft-quoted wedding chapter. Clean off some of the residue from
overuse, and there’s some brilliant stuff here. The beginning is all about our weakness, how all of our efforts amount to nothing. We can give our bodies to be burned, but if we don’t have love, it doesn’t count. Many of the problems in my relationships can be traced back to that idea. I’m trying so hard, but there’s something missing.
In Psalm 103, David writes, “God knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field, but the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him.”
Some days my love seems to flourish, and I grow excited and puffed up. But then a slight wind jostles me, and I find myself acting selfish or abrupt, with no memory of the strong love I boasted in.
God knows my frame. I’m the one who keeps forgetting. He’s not surprised by the frailty of my love. After all, He sees the past simultaneously with the future, and in those times when I am basking in the glory of my own strength, He is already forgiving the great failures which loom ahead. Like Graham Cooke says, “He’s not disillusioned about us. He never had any illusions in the first place.”
I’m the one with the illusions, so practiced—manicured, even—for the convincing of myself and others.
But we know what comes of that. Maybe you’ve been the recipient of my weak love. Maybe you know better than I the great blind spots I ignore.
All I’m trying to say is: there is a love that is stronger than ours. And we are called to love with Him, to consider others before ourselves, to lay down our lives for our friends. It’s a shift in heart posture that will manifest itself increasingly in our actions (or so I hope). I think the primary difference may be that the love discussed in Parts 1 and 2 is primarily self-focused—“look at how good I am becoming! look how good I am at loving”—whereas the other, real love is always focused on the other and foremost on God—“look how great His love is!”
I want to do this impossible thing, to become inhabited by Someone who is too big for my space, to love well. I want to let go of the compulsion to make myself appear grand. I want to draw attention to God’s love.
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