God put it on my heart both for my own encouragement and I hope, your edification, to write today about the love of God. What do I mean when I’m saying the love of God? I do not primarily mean to talk today about God’s love for us, magnificent as it was displayed through Christ, but rather our love for Him. Why do I want to talk about this now? We’ve been going through the book of Romans, unfolding the gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s plan of salvation for us through Him. My hope is for your edification, the building up of your faith, but I realized in my eagerness to unfold the gospel, I may have neglected to encourage you with the purpose of our study. My purpose is not primarily to answer your questions, or to enable you to present the gospel more clearly, or to know more of God’s will for your life. Those are all good things, but they are means to an even greater end; joy in the love of God, Jesus Christ, crucified for you to redeem you to Him.
Let’s ask ourselves a question. In dating and marriage, why do people spend so much time getting to know one another? What is their goal? Certainly the knowledge itself isn’t the goal, but the affection and love that grows out of that knowledge, right? So it is with our relationship with Christ. Unfortunately many people spend a lot of time focusing on the knowing, without praying for God to grow their love of Him through it. Now I do believe, and you may have heard me say, that right knowledge of God begets right affections for Him. However, many misunderstand salvation and Christianity as merely facts to be believed and works to be done, rather than a joyful relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. That is tragic. Those people, perhaps some of you reading this, remain burdened in a way that Christ does not desire. In Revelation, Christ speaks of a group of people, the church at Ephesus, who seemed to describe this knowledge/works without love. Rev 2:1-4 – “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: ‘The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands. “‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.”
Now some of you (and me) may look at that and I say, I haven’t even done the works to be in the position to test my motive for doing them! Thanks be to God that we live and breathe under the grace purchased for us by Jesus’ blood, that no matter where we are today we can rejoice in our Savior and seek to joyfully follow after Him. Without a thankful heart flowing from a restored relationship with Jesus through faith, nothing we do would matter. It might matter it man’s eyes, but not in God’s and wouldn’t serve to help draw us closer to Him. Being grounded in your faith, following Christ, and overcoming sin are not the products of knowledge, but even if they were, 1 Corinthians 13 tells us we would have gained nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 – “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Again in Galatians 5:6 we are told – “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.”
Paul, an apostle of God, spoke this of Himself and those with Him who were laying down their lives to spread the gospel of Jesus – 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 – “the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”
So my exhortation as we begin back in Romans next time is this, ask the question as you read God’s Word – how does the Gospel of Jesus and His revelation of Himself from His Word impact your affections for Christ today? My hope and prayer is that we would be marked as a people of God by a growing love for Christ that overflows naturally into the world around us. Nothing else matters.
Grace and Peace,
Adam
Following the Way 