The Kind of Love Every Church Needs
What do you pray for your church? Perhaps you pray for the gospel to be pure and undefiled. Maybe you pray for your pastor’s weekly preaching or the various ministries of the church. But is there something missing in your prayers?
As the Apostle Paul sat in jail, pen in hand, writing his letter to the Philippians, he told them his prayer was that their “love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment” (Phil. 1:9).
Abounding love. Knowledgeable love. Discerning love. Wise love.
Which church doesn’t need more of this kind of love?
THE PLACE WE ALL NEED
Acts 16 tells how this church started. The founding members were a rich fashionista, Lydia, and her family, a formerly demon-possessed girl, and a hardened prison guard and his family. Not exactly those whom I would think are the perfect union in which love would abound more and more. The truth is, they didn’t have any special make up that made loving easy for them. They simply had the gospel, and they let Jesus, through the gospel, transform their hearts. They were very different people, but their church was formed by a gospel culture.
A gospel culture is comprised of deeply shared love, created by and centered on Jesus, which beautifies a church. Remember how Jesus said people would know we are his disciples? “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn. 13:35). Not all churches have this love. I’ve heard some say church is the last place to ever be honest about the real state of your heart. The judgment is too hard to bear. Relationships are too fragile. Sharing your real story is perceived as a threat to others or a problem to be solved.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. When a church opens itself wholly to Jesus and rallies around him, it finds itself swept off its feet by his grace, and they find a new way to live together, a new reason to live together. When Jesus sweeps a church into his arms and his gospel becomes the soundtrack to all they are and all they do together, that church abounds in love more and more. That church becomes a place where people of all backgrounds can come and find Jesus.
In this church, Jesus isn’t hard to find because barriers aren’t built but destroyed. Here everyone is so low before Jesus that he’s lifted up and easy to see. Here there is no competitive spirit other than outdoing one another in honor. There is no reason to not confess sin because no sin is shocking, no sin is unforgivable, and Jesus is ready to cleanse everyone. In this place, you don’t find a retracting hand but a warm embrace. The response to your confession is “Dear one, Jesus can save you,” and real help and prayer follows. Here others weep with you and rejoice with you. Honesty is so common it’s shocking. True friendships blossom and grow, sustained by the Spirit. God’s glory is the goal and everyone is so happy in him they can barely stand it. More and more people who are looking for Jesus are finding him and others rejoice over them. Who doesn’t need that place?
THE PRAYERS WE MUST PRAY
How is that place created? By prayer. John 3:27 says, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven.” We must pray this into existence. Your church may be excelling in love right now, as were the Philippians, yet Paul still prayed their love would abound more and more. For the Christian, there is no end to growth in love. Drawing from Romans 13:8, the golden-mouthed pastor of old, John Chrysostom, said, “Paul desires that the debt of love should always be owing.” Love is the debt we’ll always owe and the one cost we’ll never regret paying.
It only makes sense that Christian love can continuously grow. Think of the love of God. Deep in God’s heart is a love so big that it can never be exhausted. It can never be fully plumbed. Even as we spend all eternity with him we will, every day, find new oceans of his love we’ve never noticed before. Every moment of our eternal existence with him will be a new moment of such profound love that we will never not feel loved ever again. While in his presence, we will never for one second think, “You know, I need more from you.”
Your future, by Christ’s grace and for his glory, is a future of the deepest possible felt experience of love that the Almighty God has to offer. You are so loved right now and you will be so loved for forever. Jesus is proof. Who else has died for you? He did so willingly. “For the joy set before him, he endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2). Paul is praying that present love and that future love comes crashing into our shared experience right now, moment by moment.
THE LOVE WE MUST GIVE
The love Paul prays for is not worldly love. Worldly love is all emotion. The love Paul prays for is emotional but not only emotional. It’s not primarily a feeling but a determination. This world places limits on love. Worldly love has a fine print disclaimer. Once the feeling dies, it’s over. But God’s love in Christ isn’t like that. God’s love is covenantal. It’s forever and ever, amen. And when he joins us together, he infuses us with his sustaining love so that, as we live together, outsiders look at our love and think, “Where in the world did that come from?” And we get to tell them the answer!
How does this love abound? Well, not by chance but in knowledge and discernment, as Paul tells us (Phil 1:9). It’s not just feelings but informed feelings.
By “knowledge,” Paul means a personal knowledge of God, a mature grasp of the gospel. As we grow closer to God personally, that has an impact on us corporately. The more we know God, the more reasons we find to love God and that love pushes us closer to him, which also pushes us closer to one another. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God and love your neighbor (Mk. 12:29-31). The degree to which we love God is the degree to which we will love our neighbor. The second springs from the first. Have you ever noticed that the most godly people in your life are also the most loving people in your life? That’s no accident. When Jesus changes a heart and grows and cultivates a heart by his Spirit, he creates a love that can’t help but move toward others.
Along with knowledge, this love abounds by “discernment.” The Greek word Paul uses here is recorded only once in the entire New Testament. But in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it’s used 22 times in the book of Proverbs, which gives us good insight into what Paul means. He means love that is able to see what’s right and wrong and gives positive improvement in our discipleship to Jesus. It’s practical, wise love.
THE WISDOM FROM ABOVE
What is wise love? A few questions help us understand.
How do you respond when someone sins against you? Is your first instinct to react out of your unfiltered thoughts and feelings or do you first consider what God has said in his Word about forgiveness and mercy? Does your love cover a multitude of sins or does it expose even more?
When you sin, do you ignore it and downplay it or do you consider it as serious as when someone sins against you? Do you seek to make it right in humility and honesty?
How do we disagree with one another? Can we disagree and remain brothers and sisters, or do our tribal allegiances run too deep?
What do we think about encouragement? Is it merely something we hope others give to us or something we seek to give to others? Do we look for reasons to encourage? Are our eyes open to catch one another doing good and honoring one another for their good deeds even as we give glory to God for the fruit?
We know we’re abounding in love more and more when we begin to look at each situation and think, “How does Jesus want me to move toward this person?” We abound in love more and more when we stop withholding love. How many of our problems result from withheld love? When is there not a reason to love? It’s always just a matter of how to love, not if we should love. When we abound in love more and more, we find reason to come together, and in this world, that’s counter-cultural.
Paul knew the single origin of this kind of love. It isn’t natural; it’s supernatural. It comes only by prayer. Only God can give it, and he will do so as we ask him, moment by moment.
David McLemore is an elder at Refuge Church in Franklin, Tennessee. He also works for a large healthcare corporation where he manages an application development department. He is married to Sarah, and they have three sons. Read more of David’s writing on his blog, Things of the Sort.