Expressing Love

I’ve discovered along this journey how love, which should be simple as we are called to “love one another” as Christ “has loved us” (John 15:12), is a complicated thing. Maybe the Queen song from the late 1970’s was right, it’s a “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”.

It seems the body of Christ spends more time attempting to define the different levels of love from John 21 when Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” Endless discussions and papers have attempted to define the three loves. C.S. Lewis wrote a whole book about it. But I believe God is calling us to move beyond this selfish love and discover His love, not only for us, but for others as well.

Moving Forward

A few years ago God stirred in my spirit the phrase, “It’s time to move beyond.” I’ve since come to realize this revolves around progressive revelation into what we believe and know about Him through the Scriptures. Since the days of Martin Luther and his 95 Theses famously nailed to the doors of a Catholic Church, God has been releasing various moves of God. Without going into great detail these moves include not only Luther and the Saved by Grace move, but also the Salvation movement, Pentecostal Movement and Charismatic Movement just to name a few.

I sense the Spirit of the Lord saying in these days “it’s time for the church to move beyond the selfish love so prevalent in society which has seeped into the Body of Christ. Selfish love serves only the individual. It’s tossed to a fro by every whim and doctrine and personal emotion.” The Lord is saying, “Now is the time to discover what it means to be ‘My beloved’.”

How Big is His Love

In his book “Leap Over a Wall” Eugene Peterson writes, “The Hebrew word ‘chesed’, narrowly translated as ‘love,’ is a large word. No single word in our language is adequate to describe it.” Chesed is “love without regard to shifting circumstances, hormones, emotional states, and personal convenience.”

Some will quickly say such love is unattainable by mere humans. After all, how could we possibly love someone that way? We aren’t God! However, reality is, as new creations in Christ Jesus, created in the image of God, we are capable of loving chesed.

The author of Hebrews says “Christ is the perfect mirror image of the Father” (Hebrews 1:3 The Message Translation). As believers, since we are called to be Christlike, or the mirror image of Jesus living in the world, we are capable to love chesed as God loves us as His beloved.

Selfish love will never move into such a love we are called to love one another with. Only as we discover we are His beloved and “chesed” by Him, will we be able to love others “without regard to shifting circumstances, hormones, emotional states, and personal conscience.”

“How exquisite is Your love for us, O God” (Psalm 36:7 The Message). May our love for others be as exquisite as His love is for us.

Just a guy on a journey,

Rus