Thoughts on Christian Love

In honor of Valentine's, a couple thoughts on love...

Love is making yourself vulnerable. Yet it is to this very thing that Christ has called us. It is not easy. With it comes heartache, pain, anger, frustration, deep hurt. We are called to love; even when others walk away, even when they take and never give, even when they hear but never listen, even as they destroy themselves and the relationship they are in. We are called to love.

We are not to close our hearts, but instead open both hearts and arms wide and love without reservation or condition. We do not close ourselves off from the world, but instead must be willing to love lavishly; even as Christ did on the cross, spreading his hands out for the world while at the same time being stabbed in the side by the very ones He had come to love and redeem.

We bear the same message and thus we must demonstrate it the same way. How can we preach a gospel but live it any differently than our Savior? How can we claim this love and not for this love give it away as freely as it was granted us? If Christ is our Savior and Lord, He must also be our example. He was gracious to those who did not deserve it. He gave to those who offered nothing. He came to those who would reject Him. He loved those who turned their backs on Him. He sacrificed it all for a world that would crucify Him.

This is the meaning of love. It is not conditional-love, that which mimics true love until it becomes costly. Not selfish love, that which is really nothing more than expected reciprocity. Not even familial love, that which only binds our affections by kinship and responsibility and not by choice.

We open our arms because Christ opened His. We love because Christ loved first. We follow His lead because we are compelled by His example. We do that because we are Christians. It’s who and whose we are.

Surely we can avoid all this and keep our hearts untouched. But when untouched by the world, they will also go untouched by our Savior. Unyielded, the heart will only produce the foul stench of egocentrism and ultimately a death pitied only by the most pious of grace-givers. It is in loving that we come to live and grow. It is certainly risky, but it is its fruit which is most treasured.