Reflecting Love
Reflecting Love
Read: 1 John 3:16-18
We ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
1 John 3:16
IN WORD Though we don’t fully understand God’s love, we can accept it. Even though its depth is beyond our imaginations, we can assume that because He is God—infinite, perfect, and completely “other”—He is capable of it. We, however, know how short we fall. We are not capable of that kind of love, because self-sacrifice is only part of our nature within a few special family relationships.
Nevertheless, that’s exactly the kind of love to which God calls us. We are to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. He came into this world to lay down His life for us, and He never said that’s the end of the story. We are to lay down our lives in exactly the same way. If we want to have God’s kind of love, we have to realize its depths. And its depths call for the ultimate sacrifice.
That’s hard to obey. In fact, this commandment to love each other in the same way that Jesus loved us is perhaps the most neglected in all of Scripture. It isn’t that we can’t love each other. It’s that we can’t love each other like that. We usually don’t mind going out of our way for our friends, being generous with our money, even forgiving our enemies from time to time. But to die for them? Even if we take that figuratively, it’s beyond us. We can sacrifice to a point, but there’s a line we won’t cross. We don’t pay ultimate sacrifices easily. The flesh cannot do such a spiritual thing.
That’s why it’s a certain sign of God at work in a person. Sacrificial love, in its purest sense, can only be birthed in us from above. Only the Spirit of the sacrificial God can produce sacrificial children. Only a supernatural being can do something so . . . well, supernatural.
IN DEED Ask the hard questions about your love life. Who do you love? How much? Are you willing not just to go out of your way occasionally, but to radically sacrifice for the sake of reflecting God’s love?
He alone loves the Creator perfectly who manifests a pure love for his neighbor.
—VENERABLE BEDE
From the book
