Joy - Week 3
Love is often seen as a force beyond our control, something people fall in or out of. Or it may seem like something satisfying that we can achieve, driving us to chase affection through relationships or status. “Love is all you need,” they say, because it’s the path to self-fulfillment.
But something is missing from that picture of love. The Bible invites us to see a kind of love that’s neither accidental nor driven by desire for self-fulfillment. Instead, it involves a steady commitment to care for the well-being of others—never self-seeking, always self-giving—even when it costs us.
Jesus shows this kind of love when he gives his life for friends and enemies alike. Dying on a cross, with his killers still laughing at him, Jesus cares for their well-being as he prays for their forgiveness (Luke 23:34). Living with this kind of love does not mean ignoring our own needs or devaluing ourselves. After all, Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39). But it means choosing to see all people as living miracles of God, each made in God’s image and deeply loved by him.
The Advent season leads us to reflect on the future God is bringing, where every interaction will be shaped and compelled by love. Even more, it invites us to live into that coming world right now by loving others the way Jesus does. As we give of ourselves in order to care for both friends and enemies, we demonstrate the love that Jesus shows to all people.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. - 1 John 4:7-21
In one of the most powerful reflections on love in the Bible, the Apostle John writes, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love is the way God chooses to act, yes, but it runs deeper: Love is his very essence. So if we truly know who God is, that knowledge will show up in the tangible ways we love others.
We show our love for God by loving the people who are made in his image (1 John 4:20; see Gen. 1:26-27). Love for God and love for neighbor are inseparably bound together as one way of thinking, feeling, and acting (see Mark 12:28-31). We see this way of living most clearly in Jesus.
Jesus’ love is active, costly, and directed toward healing the broken, forgiving the sinful, and restoring peace to the battle-worn and exhausted. God the Son enters humankind in Jesus, not because God pities us or because we finally did enough good to deserve his help. Instead, God lowers himself, taking on flesh and human suffering—including death—because God is love. Love moves toward the good of the other. And Jesus moves into our world, into our neighborhood, for our good.
This kind of love cannot be manufactured. We develop Jesus-style love when we choose to abide in God’s love and be shaped and transformed by it.
Living in the way of Jesus opens our eyes to see others the way God sees them. And when we see people through the eyes of love, that love shines through us in practical, helpful ways. Advent reminds us that love itself is God’s essential nature and should permeate his creation. As we choose to embrace God’s way of love, we begin to reflect it throughout the world.
How might abiding in God’s love reshape the way you see and respond to the people around you this Advent?
