Stay Dead

There is one question I have seen all over the Internet and heard in discussions recently. People are contemplating, “What does love require?” So profound in its simplicity. So intimidating in its reach. In Christian circles, the question assumes two unspoken objects, “… require of God” and “… require of me”. Before we explore these, the first rule of dialogue is to define your terms. Let’s define love.

Hollywood movies often portray love as:

That feeling you feel when you feel you’re going to feel a feeling like you’ve never felt before.

Yeah, how’s that working for you? BB King memorialized love like that when he sang, “The thrill is gone away.” Feeling-based love is as permanent as a post-it note.

Paul’s definition of biblical love in 1 Corinthians 13 is quite involved. In essence, he said:

Love is an unselfish choice for another’s highest good.

God doesn’t just love. He is love. It’s his very nature and informs everything he does. How he expresses it defines it. “For God so loved the world that he gave…”, not “that he felt”. And just how did he love the world? By giving Jesus, his Son, to atone for our sins through his perfect life, substitutionary death, and serpent’s head-bruising resurrection. God made an unselfish choice for our highest good. He always has and always will. It’s who he is.

Jared Wilson speaks to this in his new book, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing. Here are some pithy quotes, each one worthy of a lengthy discussion. You may see yourself in the quotes. I certainly do.

“Think of what love might result if we all put each other’s interests ahead of our own. We’d find ourselves in a beautiful stalemate.”

“Most of us are prepared to love others only up to the point where it begins to actually cost us.”

“See the love of the one whose face was battered for you, who, even while your sin was murdering him, spoke forgiveness to you. He was willing to lose his life to gain even you. If that’s not love, love doesn’t exist.”

“I think it’s because if Christian brothers and sisters aren’t honest and transparent and confessional with each other, we don’t really have fellowship with each other’s true selves, do we? … We just know the best version of each other we can each manage to work up when it’s time to play church.”

“When someone makes their love conditional upon our performance, our agreement, our satisfying their preferences, suddenly we end up in a transactional relationship that runs counter to 1 Corinthians 13 love.”

“Jesus sees everything. He stands at the altar with us, sees right through our veil, right through our fig leaves. He sees it all. Every doubt, every mistake, every sin, every choice made over a lifetime in which we say ‘You don’t satisfy [me], God; this will satisfy me right now’ and asked, ‘Do you take this sinner to be yours?’ Jesus says resolutely, lovingly: ‘I do.'”

So back to my original question. What does love require … of me … right now?

It requires me, as an imager of God, to reflect his character and nature. To love others just as he loved me. To forgive others just as he forgave me. To make an unselfish choice for another’s highest good. Let me unpack that.

An unselfish choice... Our corrupt nature is selfish, going by the maxim, “After me, you come first.” Selfishness costs us nothing up front. The cost is in arrears, in the personal and moral decay. But unselfishness costs us everything up front, in the willingness to die to our convenience, our comfort, our preferences, our schedule, our pride, our hate, our revenge. God’s unselfish gift of life cost him his only Son. Similarly, God calls us to come and die. Not only do we not like that—not one little bit—we are incapable of being truly unselfish without the lifelong, gentle-but-firm, transformation of our character by the Holy Spirit. It’s one thing to die to self when it’s convenient. It’s quite another to stay dead.

…for another’s highest good. How much easier would that be if we could define “good” based on our desires at any given moment? But that would be … selfish, for our good. God defines “highest good”, not as the old mistaken question WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) but as WWJHMD (What Would Jesus Have Me Do?). He’d have me love others (including my enemies) just as he first loved me (when I was his enemy). God loves (makes an unselfish choice for the highest good of) each person we hate. And that’s not just hard for us, it’s impossible, as I said, without the indwelling Holy Spirit progressively working out the image of Christ in us to die to ourselves and choose another’s highest good.

Yes, the greatest of these (the fruit of the Spirit) is love—the greatest cost with the greatest reward.

A closing word from Jared Wilson:

“You don’t know what love is until you really know who you’re loving. Sin and all. And you don’t know what love is until you really know the One who loves us perfectly. Our sin and all.”