As It Is in HeavenSample

Day 6: The Power of Love:

Today, let’s discuss the essential mindset we all need to adopt and operate in: love.

If we’re not operating in love, the church will simply not look like heaven.

We use the term “love” loosely these days. You might say that you love your spouse, your dog, your favorite shirt, and your commute to work. There’s eros, the tingly kind of romantic love. Then there is storge love, the kind you find in families, and phileo love, which describes the brotherly affection you might have for a dear friend.

However, the most important kind of love in Scripture is agape. When Paul writes in the famous “love passage” in 1 Corinthians 13 about how three things will remain when this world is all over—faith, hope, and love—and how “the greatest of these is love” (v. 13), he is referring to agape. It means benevolence, goodwill. It’s about selflessness and having another’s best interests at heart.

Agape love is unconditional. With the other kinds, it’s easy for love to become conditional—I will be nice to you if you will be nice to me. That’s why people “fall out of love”; they don’t think they are getting what they deserve anymore. Agape says I will love you come what may, whether you “deserve” it or not.

This is God’s love for us, one that reaches out. The good news of the gospel is that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). As someone has said, the highest expression of God’s love for us—His death and resurrection—came at our lowest point. That worst, most shameful event or episode from your past? Covered by Jesus’s love and blood completely.

How is this possible? Love isn’t just something God does. It is His essence. It is Who He is. First John 4:16 says, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (emphasis added).

As children of God, this is the kind of love that we are called to have for other people, and it’s not easy! It will require us to act, think, and treat others with intentionality. It is a love that is not based on personal preferences but on the fact that other people are made in the image of God. It is a love that doesn’t change like the tides or the blowing of the wind.

One day, one of the Jewish legal experts asked Jesus which of the Ten Commandments was the most important. Jesus’s answer?

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-38).

Jesus’s “love” command wasn’t just to those who may have been trying to trip Him up with a clever question. It was also to those who loved Him. At the Last Supper, He told His disciples, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).

Notice that He didn’t tell them to try to get along if they could. It wasn’t a suggestion or a wish list item. No. He directed them to love one another.

I believe that’s where we are as the church today. We have an amazing opportunity to demonstrate that we are God’s children regardless of the color of our skin. In a world of increasing tribalism, our diversity is a bright light.

We must operate in love and we must intentionally love our brothers and sisters, no matter the color of their skin, the nation they come from, or how they differ from us. When everyone within the church adopts an agape love mindset—the kind God has shown us—the church will rapidly begin to look a lot more like heaven.