”But the end of the command is love out of a clean heart and a good conscience and an unhypocritical faith.”
-Love. Love. Love. Yes, love is the greatest of these, and it is our final destination. The desired end and outcome of all we do - all our teaching and learning, all our preaching and studying, all our meetings and programs and buildings - the end goal is love. Or should be. Our ongoing mission. The Great Commission is all about making disciples who not only make other disciples but who LOVE, who live into and reproduce the Great Command and the New Command. And there is a reason why those two commands (three, actually - love God, your neighbor, and one another) are all about love - it is about what God is like. Yes, God is thrice-holy, but holiness is not merely about what He does NOT do (no sin). Even a rock or a corpse can approximate that standard. It is about what He DOES because of Who He IS. He is breathtakingly good - glorious - and this goodness in action is love. He IS love. He moves towards and pursues good on behalf of those He so loves. So, these commands to love, and all this hustle and bustle of what we call church - it all is intended to result in us becoming more and more like Him, doing more and more like Him. Who. Is. Love. Goodness in action. Love increasingly oozes out of every pore and fiber of our being - because we are becoming more and more like Him, our God of love, this One Who IS love and Who LOVES, Whose lovingkindness is everlasting. Ours is the body which is to be building itself up by His Spirit IN LOVE (Ephesians 4.16). With all our counting of noses and nickles, of budgets and buildings, with all our metrics of church growth and governance models and strategies, we ought to metric this. How am I doing at loving the Lord and loving my neighbor and loving the brother next to me? How are we doing?
-But contrary to what we hear from Lennon-McCartney and Dionne Warwick, love is not all we need. It is not the only thing that there’s just too little of. Love needs to flow from clean heart and a good conscience and an unhypocritical faith. In fact, I would argue that without these things, it will not flow at all. Because all these speak to a vital connection and healthy relationship with the living God Who is the Source of love. Without that, without Him, love is not what we’re gonna get. Not God’s love. Not twoo wuv. We’ll get a counterfeit, something other than, something less than. Something which will fall tragically short of being patient and kind and not jealous, something which WILL seeks its own and keep an account of wrongs suffered and which will NOT bear all things and believe all things and endure all things. This love will be temporary, and it will fail. Unlike God’s love. To get that, you need to go straight to the Source, and THIS One, you need to approach with a heart washed-whiter-than, sprinkled clean by the blood of His Son. You need to not be holding on to any wrongdoing in your life. And you must trust in Him fully and faithfully, consistently, not sporadically or only on Sunday mornings or when you’re in a pinch. I need to need Him every moment of every day. It must be an ongoing relationship of trust and surrender, of love and obedience with all my heart, not one where I claim or pretend to be perfect, but one of open and honest communication and one where if (when) I do mess up I am willing to admit it (and forsake it!) and move on. That is faith, and faith comes first, then the love. How are we doing?
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