Love

CHAPTER 3

Love

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1)

Afew years ago, when I was traveling extensively for work, I had a conversation with my coworker, John, about the toll travel can take on our relationships with our wives. Seeing my struggle, John shared a great suggestion. He said that whenever he travels, he leaves love letters at home for his wife. I thought that was a fantastic idea, so I started leaving short notes for my wife before each trip.

For the first few months, this went great . . . until the day I took a trip to Dallas, Texas. On the day of travel, I got up early in the morning to make the kids’ lunches, write out bus transportation notes for their teachers, and leave a love letter for my beloved, Hollie. Several hours later, I called her from Dallas to ask if she had found her letter.

She said, “What? No, I haven’t seen it.”

“Oh,” I responded. “It should be on the kitchen counter in a blank envelope.” There was a very long pause . . .

“Umm, Josh,” she said. “There is no love letter on the counter . . . but it looks like Michael forgot to take his bus note into school this morning . . .” That’s right, everybody.

You guessed it. My son picked up the love letter I wrote to my wife and gave it to his teacher! A few hours later, Michael got home from school with a frantic look on his face. “Mommy, that note you gave me . . . My teacher said I was not supposed to give it to her!”

Thankfully, there was nothing too intense in there, and fortunately, Michael was only eight years old at the time. Had he been a teenager, he probably would have been scarred for life.

What Is Love, Really?

Love is the cornerstone of all the fruits of the Spirit. When we strive to practice the fruit of love in our lives, we need to make sure we have the right messaging for the specific person we want to reach. God-given, authentic love has the capacity to transform the way we relate to and experience those far from God and the way they experience us. Getting this messaging right begins with taking a good hard look at our motives. Why do we want to evangelize? When the spiritual fruit of love is at work, it acts as a check on us, holding us accountable so that we pursue evangelization for the right reasons.

It goes without saying that the worst possible motive for sharing the good news would be to build up our own ego. There is no book in heaven keeping track of how many people you have convinced to follow Christ. There is no special door prize at the pearly gates based on your tier of performance. Yet there will be times when the enemy of our souls will attempt to deceive us, when he will try to trick us into making the mis-

sion of the gospel all about us rather than those we are called to love and serve.

One approach the enemy takes in this regard is to lead us to neglect our relationship with Jesus. We hear a whispering in our ears: Look at all the good work you are accomplishing in bringing souls to him. What need do you have for prayer and time with God? In its vilest form, we might even be tempted to neglect the moral life as a concession for all our hard work for the mission. Neglecting prayer and devotion and turning aside from morally right conduct lead us away from the fullness of life found only in deep, intimate relationship with Jesus.

We also need to guard against the desire to be right. Have you ever had an argument with someone over a bit of mindless trivia? Who was the actor in that old movie, or which artist sings that great new song? (Today, we can just turn the debate over to Google and let the gloating begin.) There is nothing wrong with this playful competitiveness when it comes to mindless trivia, but there is when it comes to sharing the gospel. We need to guard against the unhealthy desire to win faith-related arguments, especially with those who are far from God.

This can be tough for some of us. We take the time to train, to study, and to grasp the roles of logic and reason in the life of faith. We then falsely conclude that it is righteous or holy to crush others’ arguments if they disagree. It is not. Think first about the person you want to convince. It is hard enough for someone to come to Christ. Do we need to make it harder by forcing them to swallow their pride and admit we won an argument? If we really want to convince our friends to follow

Jesus, one of the worst approaches we can take is to create a situation in which we might say, “I told you so.”

Finally, here’s a false motive that can hit pretty close to home for many of us: evangelizing in order to bring people to church because we don’t want our churches to close. Let me say that again. We should not try to convince people to come to church so that our churches won’t close. Ultimately, this is selfish and inward focused. A friend of mine has referred to it as spiritual vampirism, or getting fresh blood. I understand why this can be a temptation, though. Perhaps some of you worship in the same church building as your parents, and maybe even your grandparents and great-grandparents. As the Church goes through this difficult season of shifting cultural dynamics, we can be tempted to rush out and try to bring in a bunch of new people so that we can keep the legacy alive.

Don’t get me wrong. We all want to be part of something that is growing rather than dying. It is good that we love our churches, and as a secondary motivation, trying to keep them open is fine. The only appropriate reason to evangelize, however, is love—to bring people to Jesus, not to preserve our church buildings. We are enabled by the Spirit to bear the fruit of love and to extend that love to each person we encounter. Genuine love leads us to want the best for others.

Discovering the Lovability of Others

I heard about a man who attended Alpha and, as he learned to pray, began to experience profound connections to God. One