Lately, I’ve been reflecting on what it truly means to show God’s love to others. In a world filled with division and pain, I know we’re called to be a light. But at times, I struggle with how to make that love real, especially when people are hurting or seem distant. How do you approach this? What are some ways we can genuinely reflect God’s love in our daily interactions?
It helps me in figuring out how best to love others to understand well what agape love is: a deep, over-riding desire for intimate communion with God. This is what the Triune Godhead enjoyed within itself prior to Creation and it is what God offers to us through Christ.
The Psalmist describes this deep desire - this love - of and for God.
Psalm 84:2
2 My soul longed and even yearned for the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Psalm 63:1
1 O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 42:1-2
1 As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God...
There is something of this great longing, this love, for God in Paul's words in his letter to the Philippians:
Philippians 3:7-8
7 But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,
When God commands me in His word to love my neighbor (
Matt. 22:39), I understand this to mean, first and foremost, that they would come to enjoy God's best for them, which is daily, holy, life-changing, communion with Himself (
2 Cor. 13:14; 1 Jn. 1:3b; Rev. 3:20; Ps. 36:7-9). I love my neighbor as I desire this for them and act to bring about their own, personal, ever-deepening experience of God, though it may cost me severely to do so. For my non-believing neighbor, this means I do all I can to see them born-again (evangelism); for my saved neighbor, this means I do all I can to help them move deeper and deeper into joyful, loving, faithful, holy fellowship with their Maker (i.e discipleship).
Often, evangelism and discipleship - God's two great mandates to the Church (
Matt. 28:19-20) - are marginalized by lesser goods like feeding clothing, sheltering, physically healing, and educating the lost. What the lost most need, however, is spiritual and eternal, not material and temporal. I show no truly godly love to the lost, then, by just making them physically comfortable on their way to hell. In fact, if doing so relieves them of a need for God, I have done them great evil. Agape love always works to move a person into communion with God and if it doesn't, it isn't agape love.
This isn't to say that Christians ought not to show kindness and generosity toward others - they certainly should - but that God's priority for the lost isn't their material/temporal well-being but their eternal, spiritual well-being which is found only in fellowship with Himself.