New Year's Thoughts

Known by Our Love

In John 15, Jesus gives the disciples his final instructions and prays for them as he prepares them to go out into the world. He tells them that if they’re his friends, they’ll obey his commandment, and his commandment is that they love one another. In other places in the gospels, Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. The second is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

To illustrate who our neighbor is, he then tells the parable of the Good Samaritan – a man who bound up the wounds of someone who would see him if not as an enemy, definitely not as a friend. So Jesus is saying that we’re to love both the brethren – our fellow Christians – and our neighbors who may sometimes look like our enemies. In the Sermon on the Mount, he makes it explicit that we’re to love our enemies and to do good to those that hate us and persecute us.

I have to take these commandments as, first, applying to myself. I’m to love as Jesus – who was willing to lay down his life for his friends, as well as his enemies (us) – loved. At times, we may literally need to be willing to lay down our lives for our friends, but for some of us – thinking of myself here – what that may mean is putting aside our own desires, our own time, and our own interests, and giving of ourselves to others.

That truth has hit me particularly hard the past few months because of the way I sometimes feel about caregiving for an aunt. The Holy Spirit has reminded me that much is required from those to whom much has been given. And I know that I’ve been given much compared to this aunt. I have a husband, children, grand and great grand-children, a brother and sister-in-law, a mother who is still living and in her right mind at the age of 95 – none of which this aunt has. How can I possibly resent the time I spend taking care of her? Yet, sometimes I do. For me at least, loving as Jesus commands is hard. I doubt other Christians find it easier.

Jesus commands us first to love our fellow Christians, to unity in our allegiance to Him and to the faith given to the saints, as Paul says. While we may have doctrinal differences with other Christians, that doesn’t give us leave to harbor anger toward them. We can seek to persuade others to our positions, and we have an obligation to denounce outright heresy, but in all other things, charity should prevail. And prayer for those we believe are misguided. God will sort out the doctrinal differences someday, and we may find those differences aren’t as important as we think they are.

But though we’re first called to love our fellow Christians, we’re also called to love our non-Christian neighbors, even if we see them as our enemies. This is where many of us are losing our way. It’s one thing to hate their sins and their false philosophies. It’s another thing altogether to hate them personally. But, given the tremendous differences in our politics and worldviews, this is where we often find ourselves. We’d accomplish far more by praying for them, though, than we ever will by hating and fighting them.

It would serve us well, too, to realize that worship of America is idolatry. It’s one thing to love our country and to be a patriot. It’s another to let love of country or our idea of what America should be cause us to hate our neighbors who disagree with us. America is not our God. And if it falls, God will still be in his heaven, and his church will still stand. God never promised us that we’d live in a country governed precisely as we want it to be. The first Christians didn’t live in such a country, yet they turned the world upside down. How? By their love. Not by their hate. Not by the great revolution they thought the Messiah would lead. They lived out Jesus’ commandments in a hostile world.

We should, of course, seek justice and use whatever peaceful means available to influence public policy in the direction we believe is just. But we also need to act with justice and mercy toward our political opponents. At times, we may be led to sound a prophetic note, but we need to sound it in kindness and love, with a humble spirit, realizing that we don’t have all knowledge and understanding. And even if we did, without love, as Paul writes, it would mean nothing. We know Satan has blinded many people to the truth, but we also have to recognize our own inability to know the truth perfectly.

As Paul says, now we see through a glass darkly, but someday – face to face – we’ll have the perfect knowledge we now lack. Meanwhile, we’re left with Jesus’ commandments to love our enemies as we love our friends. Like the early Christians, we live in a hostile world much in need of the Savior’s love. May 2026 be the year Christians once again become the ones who are known by that love.