When Jesus ascends in Matthew’s gospel he leaves the disciples with what has been called The Great Commission. “19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
You have probably heard before that the Greek for “go” here means “go and as you go” instead of pick up everything and go. It means as you live your life and are on your way a part of your life now is making disciples and teaching them to obey what you now obey.
If that’s the way to read it then the obvious question is, “What is the meaning of everything I have commanded you”? What are the commands of Jesus?
If we look carefully at the commands of Jesus to the disciples we will find very few. What we will find is pretty much summed up in John 15:12: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”
The disciples who wrote letters to the early church say much the same. Here are the words of Peter and John when they describe the most fundamental message of Jesus.
1 John 3:11: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another.”
2 John 6: “…and this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.”
1 John 3:23: “…and this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.”
1 Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply.”
1 Peter 1:22: “Love one another deeply, from the heart.”
2. Yes, faith and belief are important and necessary. The first requirement is belief in the name of Jesus. Without that there is no salvation or new life. But what are the commands and laws of this new life? Very few…and that is frustrating! From the beginning you can hear people saying, “But what about this and that?” What is the answer more often than not? “Love each other deeply.”
The Christian life or what Paul calls “following the way of Love” is remarkably short on laws and commands. In fact, Paul says in several places that the entire law is summed up in one command, “love your neighbor as yourself” in Galatians 5:14, for example. In Romans 13:10 he says this, “Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”
3. As Paul says, the essence of the law of love is not love without an object or a result. It is love your neighbor. Love your brother in Christ. Love the person in your immediate vicinity and work out from there.
John puts it this way in 1 John 3:16: “16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”
What does James say in James 2:14? “14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
In other words, the kind of love Jesus and the apostles described begins here – among ourselves and then works its way out from here. If we cannot love here we cannot love somewhere else.
4. Love? That’s it? What about all those thousand and one situations that come up in life that need more than love? “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”
We need more than that. We cannot just love people!
It’s true…but what we can do must come from love – a supernatural love that we cannot muster up ourselves. Of course, that supernatural love – what Scripture describes as agape love or selfless love – is not the only love in the world that we have.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled The Four Loves that has helped me understand the various kinds of love God has given us. Three of them are natural and, for the most part, come as standard equipment for all of us. There are rare exceptions – as in sociopaths – but we all have access to three kinds of love.
The first is Affection (Storge)
Affection is the love we have for something that is familiar – like family. It is something that we feel even if the person is not someone we would choose as a friend but we love them the way they are. Affection is what we feel for people with whom we spend parts of our lives – like co-workers. Affection is what we feel for animals and pets. Some of you feel that more than others. It’s the feeling you have for those around you that you expect to see when you come home or go to the office. “Essentially, affection is a love of something familiar that may be in itself rather unlovable.. Affection can be felt for someone that is most definitely not the type of person you would choose as your own friend but are forced to be around through circumstance. In some ways, affection is sort of a taking-for-granted love, but in the right way. In the way that you love the person as they are, I think.” “Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine,..”
The second of the four loves is Friendship (Phileo)
“I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Friendship begins with a common interest – think about your friends. How did you begin being friends? “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.
As an aside, it is the love from which we get the word for philanthropy – love of mankind. Ironically, philanthropy is not really friendship, is it? It is more like being a benefactor with solutions for problems instead of friendship based on having something in common and the enjoyment of being together in that.
The third love is Romantic Love (Eros)
For Lewis, this is different from purely sexual desire. “Lewis tells us that when a man “wants a woman,” as they say when he is looking for a prostitute, what he really wants is not a woman but “a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary apparatus.” He also tells us that “Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.” Eros is not what we have made it to be in a distortion of what it was intended. It is not lust. It is the right kind of desire for another person that includes sexuality but only as part of that desire of a particular person – a person we desire to love. Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all. All of these are natural but there is a fourth love which is supernatural and does not come as standard equipment. It is the distinguishing mark of a Christian. No other religion can claim this love because no other religion is an expression of God’s self-less love. God does not need love, in the way we think of need. Lewis puts it this way when he distinguishes between “need-love” and “gift-love”. “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
The fourth love is Charity (Agape) and this is the love of Christ the apostles are writing about in Scripture. It’s source is supernatural. We cannot create it. We can only receive it. It is the foundation of the church. In a sense, it is the mission of the church. Out of it flows everything else we do and without it we are simply engaged in activity.
Romans 5:5: “…and God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
It is the only way to fulfill the impossible command but it is like commanding someone to walk on water or raise the dead or heal the sick or love the completely unlovable. No matter how hard we try over and over again we will fail because we do not have this kind of love. It is love that has been given to us as a gift from God. It is the love that reminds us that we are unlovable ourselves and that he first loved us and reconciled us to himself through Christ.
It is the love that Paul describes in Ephesians 5: “1 Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Philippians 2: “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
1 Corinthians 13: “4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of these is charity.”
Unfortunately, like philanthropy, charity has become something it is not. It now means purely emotional and ineffective giving with little regard for what happens. It is more like pity than love. In fact, true charity is the highest form of giving because it is selfless and most reflects the nature of God. We need more charity and less what we call philanthropy.
It is the love that we cannot create – no matter how hard we try. It comes only through the Holy Spirit and as a gift. It is the cement that holds the church together and it is why Christ left us with just this command: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It is the love that lays down its life for a brother. It is the love that seeks the good of the other person over its own. It is the love that is the first fruit of the spirit and the last to remain when all else has passed away.
I want to read something from The Four Loves in closing:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
Love one another. Love one another deeply. Love one another with charity. Love one another as Christ loved you. Owe no one anything except the debt of love. Love from the heart. Follow the way of love.
This is the law and the humanly impossible command.