And to love is to know God.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8. (NIV).]
1. Prisoners: a metaphor.
As a lawyer, I used to represent prisoners in "lifer hearings". In a lifer hearing, a prisoner with a life sentence tries to persuade a parole board to release him from prison.
Sometimes my clients had no chance. If a prisoner has a "115" within the last five years, he can’t win parole. 115s are "serious" violations of prison rules. 115s can be anything from a kitchen worker stealing food, to possession of a cellular phone, to membership in a prison gang, to rape. The parole board assumes that if a prisoner won’t follow the rules in prison, he won’t follow rules out of prison.
Sometimes, a prisoner-client had a habit of picking up 115s. I would counsel him that if he wanted to win release on parole, he couldn’t pick up any more 115s. I couldn’t tell him how to stay out of trouble. But I would tell him that he had to wake up in the morning thinking about how to stay out of trouble, and that staying out of trouble had the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep at night. I would tell him that he had to become a genius at staying out of trouble.
I use prisoners as a metaphor for Christians. That’s because we are all prisoners of sin. We hope for mercy, not from a parole board but from God. (Romans 11:32 – "God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all".)
If we are saved, love saves us – the love of God, and the love that God causes to arise in us. "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4:8.)
We need to learn to love like some of my clients need to learn to keep away from trouble.
2. A simple plan.
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]The Lord commands that we love him, that we love our enemies, and that we love our neighbors. He does not command us and then leave us without the ability to obey. He guides us. He tells us to ask and to seek.
3. Asking.
"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" [Luke 11:11-13 (NIV).]My prisoner-clients would benefit from friends to help them stay out of trouble. If they started down a path toward a 115, their friends might warn them away from what they were doing. Their friends might help by exhortation to walk blamelessly. My clients and their friends might share strategies for walking blamelessly through the maze of prison rules and opportunities to do wrong.
Like prisoners who struggle to stay out of trouble, we need allies in our effort to increase in love. The most powerful ally we can have is the Holy Spirit. To get the help of the Holy Spirit, we can ask.
And if we have friends, we can ask them to pray for us, and we can pray for them. Any big task should start and be sustained with prayer.
Asking is the first step; it might also be the hardest. Going from childhood to adulthood is a process of going from helplessness to some form of self-sufficiency. That’s called carrying one’s own weight, and it's a quality that we value in ourselves. To ask for help is to admit that we are not self-sufficient. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that Jesus said that we had to become like little children.
"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." [Matthew 8:3-4 (NIV).]4. Seeking.
Having asked, we seek. With so many directions open to us, we look for the path that leads to the promised land.
5. Seeking from the Holy Spirit.
Having asked, hopefully the Holy Spirit will be our guide to say "Not that way, this way". This guidance might come from within, or it might come through some agency outside ourselves.
6. Seeking from the Bible.
The Bible is a good guide. You can interpret many things that Jesus says as trail signs to direct us toward love.
For example, Jesus said:
"You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. [Matthew 5:43-45 (NIV).]Hate opposes love. If we follow Jesus’s direction to pray for those who persecute us, we step off the path of hate and follow the path of love. This direction benefits our enemies, but it benefits ourselves, too. It puts in our minds a habit of love.
And to hold a grudge is the opposite of love. So Jesus said:
"And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." [Mark 11:25 (NIV).]To forgive also makes mental paths of love.
Another example – Jesus told us not to fret:
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." [Matthew 6:34 (NIV).]The thing about worry is this: it foregrounds self-concern. Self-concern crowds out love, which is other-directed. By setting aside any habit of fretting, we give space for love to grow.
Easier said than done. Like increasing in love, decreasing in worry does not come automatically. In part it’s a choice: sometimes we can simply choose not to worry. In part, it’s a matter of strategy. Dale Carnegie wrote a book called, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I recommend it. And in part, to cease to fret is a matter of prayer.
I'm far more likely to behold these radical words than to follow them; but there little distance between them and love:
Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. [Luke 12:33-35.]
These words fortify love two ways. If we obey them, then our heart will follow our treasure. But if this commandment is too big for us, then it gives us humility. And we love God more easily if we are not too big in our own minds.
7. Seeking from any source we can find.
If we really want to find our way through undiscovered country, we don’t despise any good guide.
To increase in love, we might learn from any friend who’s habits of love we admire.
We might learn about love from a movie, like Babette’s Feast. (A tolerance for subtitles is needed to enjoy this movie.)
We might learn about love from books. Years ago, Chuck Coleson’s books always moved me. Lately, I’ve traveled in St. Augustine’s Confessions.
8. Just do it.
But maybe Nike owns the secret: Just do it. A habit of hateful acts, hateful words, gossip, slander, unkindness in general, and sin takes us away from God. But a habit of loving acts makes a loving mind.
I envy parents. I think that raising children can be a school of love.
I try to do acts of love. I tithe, splitting my tithe between my church and the Salvation Army. I also give to an organization that gives aid overseas. And I help a friend financially from time to time. This is not a boast, because I do far less than I could.
I once read the words of a man who was baffled by sexual frustration in modern society. He argued that the near-infinite number of persons created near-infinite opportunities for sexual release. Thankfully, this licentious chirp hasn’t been widely repeated (though it seems to be practiced in some conjoined circles). But in a sense, his idea applies to good works: opportunities to do acts of love are near-infinite to one who looks for them.
I’ve heard that everything we do leaves a mark on our soul. The grace of God means that marks left by our sins are not indelible. But efforts to do right can’t help but decorate our souls with marks of love.
9. Grace.
But effort to do right can puff us up. It can makes us feel spiritually self-sufficient. Then we’re no longer the like the little children we must be to gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven. We become like the Pharisee of Jesus’s parable, who stood before God and gave thanks that he was spiritually excellent. We become unlike the tax collector of the same parable, who cried out "Have mercy upon me, a sinner!" Jesus said that the tax collector left the temple justified before God, but not the Pharisee. (Luke 18:9-14.) As we strive, we need to remember that we always rely upon the grace of God.
If effort can make us feel spiritually self-sufficient, it can also make us feel spiritually inadequate. Spiritual disappointment with ourselves is like the wall that athletes sometimes hit, when their race-times stop getting better or get worse. That is discouraging.
Grace rescues us in that, too . When we hit a spiritual wall, we need to be gracious to ourselves. We need to be self-forgiving, we need to be patient, and we need to not give up.
10. Self-examination: doing a new thing
From time to time, we should assess our progress in love.
But this self-examination shouldn’t be hyperactive. That can discourage us. And it can lead to a Pharisee-like over-focus on the self.
Hopefully, our self-examination will lead us to do new things. As a competitive swimmer, I’m alert to how I swim, and I look for ways to swim faster. As a believer, I want to be as attentive to ways to increase in love as I am to ways to win races.
Everything that I have talked about in this essay once was a new thing to me. And I have no idea what new things I might learn in the future about love and how to grow in it.
And sometimes old things become new. I read the Bible more deeply now than I did twenty years ago. Things stand out that didn’t stand out before. Also, I’m not new to prayer, but I depend on prayer these days more than I did in times past.
11. Self-examination: doing away.
Self-examination might lead us to cut loose some guides and some principles that we once relied upon. I think that obedience to God is fundamental and crucial; but lately I have tilted somewhat more in my thoughts toward grace, more than in years past.
Self-examination might lead us to unburden ourselves of things that hold us back. That might be certain friends who draw us away from God.
My habit of getting into political arguments doesn’t help me grow in love. I’ve tried to cut back. But I backslide. It’s a work-in-progress.
We might need release from addictions – certainly from addictions in the literal sense of substances that we put into our bodies to our detriment. But addictions can take many forms – persons, pleasures, things, ideas.
Some addictions are things that aren’t necessarily bad in and of themselves. Apart from their merits or demerits, Fox News or The New York Times could be addictions if we cherish them too much.
I once read parts of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s book about creativity. She wrote that she loves movies, but she gives them up for the sake of focusing on her art. Like Twyla Tharp gives up movies for dance, we might give up things that seem like harmless pleasures for the sake of love.
One young man came to Jesus earnestly seeking guidance. He was morally scrupulous, but he believed that he lacked something. Jesus told him that to be perfect he should sell all that he had and give the money to the poor; then follow him. (Matthew 19:16-28.)
We might need to give up some things right away. Others we might give up as time goes by. Our self-examination will take place over months and years and decades. What we will find in ourselves in a month won’t be the same as what we find in a decade.
We’re taking a journey through our minds from selfishness to love. Like a cross-country traveler, as we go the terrain changes. As terrain changes, our strategy to move forward also must change.
12. Time well spent.
We tend to get good at what we work at. Over time, a person who conscientiously works at archery gets better at archery. The same is true for swimming, writing, carpentry, driving, dancing, leadership, and art.
And love.
The two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. Archery and swimming and all of the things that I just mentioned will end. But love is forever. Time spent learning love is well spent.
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