It is so important for the Ekklesia to model true community, but how do we get there? The Servant Community by Art Mealer helps guide us in the right direction. I’m so encouraged as this work acts as a bridge, moving from the structural dos and don’ts to the inner motivations of our hearts and spirits. The excerpt below examines how we should love one another.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another [notice, not love the lost, but love the saints]: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know [including the lost] that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” -John 13:34-35
This new command will not bring us life-Jesus brings us life-but it will bring us freedom. Jesus previously explained that all the commandments hang on loving God (as detailed in the first four commandments) and loving our neighbor (as presented in the following six commandments). These tell us about God’s values and personality. “Loving others as he loves us” emphasizes not another law, nor a quantitative “love as much as Jesus loved,” but a qualitatively new kind of love. The love Jesus has been exercising was generated by His determined choice apart from the worthiness of its object. Jesus manifests a love unconstrained by eligibility requirements, showing us a new way of loving each other.
In beginning and maintaining relationships, we do not ask the prudent and self-protective question, “Does this person deserve my love?” We look at Jesus, and the apostle John redirects our position,“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” -I John 4:11
Our question becomes, “Do I owe this person my love?” and that question is forever answered, “Yes.” Yes, if I am to love as Jesus loved. We are freed from assessing the worthiness of another. Love’s
privilege and obligation stand apart from such evaluations. We follow the example of the one whose love without boundaries willingly led him to the shame and suffering of that awful cross. On our behalf. We like the benefit, but not the cost. And we learn love costs. So, in practice, we can be a petty people. We forgive, but just so far-we keep count.
However, as forgiveness stands without measure in Christ’s community, we needfully extend each other a “seven-times-seventy” love. Why? Because that is how he loves us. Because as members of His community, we are to live in relationally close quarters. Nowhere to hide and nurse our petulant pride. Choosing to do so, we move beyond superficial politeness to where inevitable irritations and provocations expose our own imperfections. Rather than eroding our care for one another, these interpersonal abrasions train us to love beyond natural love. It is necessary to develop a kind and patient love that endures and “covers a multitude of sins.” Finding we are loved when we are unlovely is the humbling power of the new love Jesus commanded. The old love, based on merit, breeds pride in ourselves and leads us to find fault in others; fault found, we indulge our tendency for self-protection and self-promotion. Discord ensues. But now we are freed from that trap; what wounds come to us we endure with grace; our love grows, and what failings others may or may not have become irrelevant.
The apostle Paul needfully advises us in his letter to the Ephesians, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and perpetual animosity, resentment, strife, fault-finding and slander be put away from you, along with every kind of spitefulness, verbal abuse, and malevolence.” -Ephesians 1:31, (Amplified Version).
If we dwell on how badly we believe someone has behaved towards us, we will struggle to love and forgive as Christ commanded. We do, on occasion, deeply wound each other. Sometimes we falsely imagine wounds or fail to acknowledge they were unintended. The resultant feelings of hurt and betrayal can be overwhelming. And there lies another qualitative difference in loving as Jesus loves us. A recipient of God’s grace ought to be gracious to others.
This new love instructs us to turn our mental rehearsals away from how we were treated and toward how God has treated us. His graciousness is our meditation through each day, where he lifts from us each mistake, each failure, each opening sin finds for our affection. We are aware of God’s forgiveness, which demands forgiveness of our trespassers, just as God’s love demands we love others. Recounting the privilege we enjoy, enfolded as we are in undeserved love and unbounded forgiveness, we find our wounds are not so deep. Like waking from a bad dream and realizing nothing was real, our tightly held injury fades like an illusion. Left in its place is the unique joy of freedom from demanding justice.
But If circumstances require it, the love of Jesus further invites us to put ourselves to death-the very opposite of our instinct for self- protection. Whatever happens, we become free to follow him in loving others as he has loved us: accepting, welcoming, and forgiving one another. Paul continues, “Be kind and helpful to one another, tender-hearted, compassionate, understanding, forgiving one another readily and freely, just as God in Christ also forgave you.” -Ephesians 1:32 (Amplified Version)
Isn’t this a grace none of us are worthy of receiving, but we all desperately need, not only from God but from each other?
Jesus assures us that our love for one another-in the way Jesus loved us-is the clear and unmistakable hallmark of our being His disciples. The resulting unity and harmony confirm that Jesus came from the Father. This living proof, written in the epistles of our hearts, reaches across national and cultural boundaries to everyone in every language as people see God manifested in His people.
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