It’s one of the most frequent commandments in the Bible:
- Romans 12:10 – “Love one another with brotherly affection.”
- 1 Thessalonians 4:9 – “You yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.”
- 1 Peter 1:22 – “Love one another earnestly from a pure heart.”
- 1 John 3:11 – “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning: that we should love one another.”
Love is one of the most overused words in our culture today. What does “love” even mean when you can use the word in reference to lasagna, a football team, a sweater, or a person? “Yeah, yeah, yeah, love one another,” you say as your eyes glaze over. Another problem with the word today is everyone generally assumes that they’re doing it.
It’s with this in mind that we really ought to dig a little deeper when we cross paths with the word “love” in Scripture, because there’s a good chance it means very different things to God than to us. One of the ways we dig deeper is by asking questions. For example, why is God so insistent that we grow in love? Here are some answers the Bible teaches.
Reason #1: Because Jesus commands me to grow in love.
“A new command I give to you,” Jesus said, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34). You say: How can Jesus command me to feel a certain way about a person? Once you understand what love is to God, you’ll realize that’s not what God is commanding. Love in the Bible is less emotion, and more in motion. It’s active, giving, and sacrificial. It’s not focused on me first, but on others first. That’s a huge difference with how the world views love. And that can be commanded.
Reason #2: Because showing love convinces the lost that Jesus is real.
Immediately after giving us his new command for us to love others, Jesus adds, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Love is the greatest apologetic for Christianity. It’s the first and final defense of our faith. This is what caused the pagans in the Roman empire to flood into the church. They saw nothing like the lives that these early Christians led. “See how they love one another,” was the word on the street about us. And this same thing will win the neo-pagans growing in number today.
Reason #3: Because it proves that I know and love God.
That apostle John put it bluntly: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20-21). There are a lot of people who fill churches whose heads are full of Bible verses, but they’re also full of grumbling, judgmentalism, and unforgiveness. If an unbeliever sees the disconnect between what’s in your head from what’s in your heart, they’ll have good reason to question your love for God.
Reason #4: Because growing in love is the aim of our discipleship.
“Abide in my love,” Jesus said (John 15:9). “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love,” chimed in Paul (1 Cor.13:13). The Bible insists that disciples of Jesus should grow in three areas: Knowledge, Fruitfulness, and Christlike love and holiness (Col.1:9-10; Phil.1:9-11). Interestingly, if I grow in knowledge but not love, the Bible says I am nothing (1 Cor.13:2. Furthermore, if I grow in fruitfulness, to the point of doing great works for God, but don’t have love, I gain nothing (1 Cor. 13:3). Why? Because Christlike love is the aim of our discipleship. It’s the best proof that we are growing spiritually.
Reason #5: It’s the ultimate purpose for your life.
Divine love is at the very heart of creation. Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4 that “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him; in love he predestined us.” See how love was woven right into the very foundation of life, even before God created us? So if you spend all your time chasing pleasure and possessions, building up the Kingdom of You, then you will have missed the very purpose of your life when your life is over. (And you’ll have a lot of explaining to do to your Creator about the choices you made.)
Reason #6: If you don’t grow in love, then evil will grow. At its heart, life is a moral journey.
In a sermon on the end of the age, Jesus says, “And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” (Matthew 24:12). Notice the inverse relationship between good and evil. If one increases the other must decrease. How do we keep evil from growing? By daily choosing to be a person who grows in love. We might say that the world needs us to make this choice, if the world is to become a place worth living in.
Reason #7: Love is the core of God’s very essence and character.
It’s not that God is loving. God is love. “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8). Examine the Ten Commandments and you’ll see that imbedded directly into them are both the love of God and the love of neighbor. The first four commandments deal with our love of God. The last six commandments deal with our love for people. (A similar pattern can be observed in Jesus’s Beatitudes.) Why grow in love? Because if I hope to ever know God, then love is the language he speaks. In fact, God doesn’t have a love-language. Love is his language.
Questions To Think About
1. What are some specific ways you have grown in Christlike love in the last 2-3 years of your faith?
2. If you do not believe you have been growing as much as you would like, what are some things hindering you, or some things you could do differently?
2. Of the seven reasons we gave for why we ought to grow in love, pick two that seem most important for you right now. What are they? And why did you choose them?