Over the coming weeks I will be posting a series of blogs on one topic: "Share the Love." I believe we are all called to do this by our Maker. It is our highest calling among our fellow humans, and I have discovered a multitude of ways to do this and to be empowered to do so. I want to share these with you.
The best way to understand the meaning and importance of sharing love with each other is to read Jesus' own words to His disciples directing them to love. Jesus' life was an absolute
definition of love and His words to His disciples on His last evening with them made His command clear: "Love each other as I have loved you" (John 15:12).
Throughout John's gospel, John refers to himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (for examples, see John 13:23 and 19:26). John was on the scene for some of the most significant events in Jesus' earthly life (Matthew 17:1). When Jesus hung on the cross, He gave John the responsibility of caring for Jesus' own mother, Mary (John 19:25-27). The brotherly relationship between Jesus and John must have been the very model of the bond Jesus was calling all of us to have with each other, and John's purpose in recording this account of Jesus' life and message was to communicate the nature and essence of that love.
Chapters 14 through 16 are the words Jesus spoke to His disciples, His closest friends, allies, and students, just before He was handed over to the officials for His crucifixion. Jesus knew what was coming and that He had only a few hours left to communicate His deepest thoughts, concerns, and desires to these friends. Knowing that His time among them was nearing an end, the one thought that He kept coming back to over and over again was simply, "Love one another." It must have been the most important thing He wanted them to know, the one guiding principle He wanted them to carry with them through their upcoming trials and challenges in the days, weeks, and years to come.
Jesus knew that this love--the very foundation of His connection with God the Father and the Holy Spirit (John 15:9)--would be the bond that would connect His disciples to Him and to each other, the basis upon which His church would be founded, and the truth that would unite the church as one Body. In fact, in one of his later writings, John says that our very identity as followers of Jesus Christ would be revealed in our love: "This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another" (1 John 3:10-11).
But Jesus did not simply give us this command to love one another and then leave it to us to figure out how to love that way. In John 17, Jesus closed His time with the disciples that night with a prayer of protection, sanctification, and empowerment; a prayer that God would grant them the same love that He had shown Jesus; a prayer that the Holy Spirit would be sent to dwell in and among them and fill them with His love. He knew we would not be able to conjure up that kind of love through our own strength or determination.
Jesus knew that the kind of love needed to change our lives and to change the world would only be possible through the grace and divine power of God Himself.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
