Continuity of Love

Scripture

‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.  If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no-one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:9-13 NIVUK)

Continuity of Love

We tell little kids that “Well, he started it” is not a useful justification for unhelpful behaviour. Yet it continues as a justification for any number of aggressive and harmful actions from the playground to the world stage. Hostility breeds hostility and escalates unless there is some intervention.

My Dad died in 2001 and went to his grave not having spoken to one sister for the 50 years following a dispute at his mother’s funeral. It’s one reason my brother and I have worked to be sure our relationship is one of love and forgiveness no matter how difficult an older brother I have been. Love begets love and can even escalate to be deeper and more profound over time.

The quid pro quo of vengeance and judgment as responses to others’ offenses was alive and well on the roads of Palestine as Jesus walked with his friends. Yet he had a different message. He relished the love he shared with his Father and he offered that love to his friends and all who came near him. 

“Love each other as I have loved you” continues the pattern – love begets love. When He says that we will remain in His love when we obey that instruction, he isn’t being conditional. It is just a matter of fact that our acts of love keep us closer to his heart than hatred would. Let’s be perpetrators of love and perpetuators of his pattern of love begetting love.

A Prayer for Today

We pray that out of Your glorious riches You may strengthen us with power through Your Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And we pray that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of Yourself O God. (Ephesians 3 NIVUK)