Love ought to be one of the hallmarks of Christianity, especially the love that Christians have for one another (John 13:35).
Unfortunately, far too many Christians fail to show God’s love to their brothers and sisters in Christ, choosing instead to engage in name-calling, slander, gossip, heresy-hunting, public shaming, unbiblical separation, and character defamation, among other pursuits that damage Christ’s bride. These unchristian activities come from a variety of motivations, but all reveal a heart captivated more by love for itself than love for the One who loved them and gave himself for them.
Engaging in “friendly fire” may make a Christian feel like they are a champion for God’s cause, but it is an insidious evil, slowly but surely drawing us away from the heart of our Father even as we may believe it is doing the opposite.
There are numerous warnings against judgementalism in the New Testament (Matthew 7:1-5, Luke 6:37-38 & 41-42, Romans 14:13, 1 Corinthians 4:5, and James 5:9). And in Hebrews 13:1-19, we discover a wonderful counterbalance—brotherly love—tucked somewhat inconspicuously into Hebrews 13:1.
May we recommit to learning ever more of the love of our Father and then sharing that love with all but especially with those who are fellow members of God’s family.
The Meaning of Love
Love, especially in our day, is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts out there. Love has been reduced to mere sentimentality or it has been redefined as affirmation. If you love, you go along with whatever the person that you love comes up with. To love, then, in our culture broadly speaking, is to affirm. And that, of course, is not what love is.
Engaging in “friendly fire” may make a Christian feel like they are a champion for God’s cause, but it is an insidious evil.
Love is also not the same all the time. A famous phrase in our culture currently is “love is love”, which is not true. If I say that I love fried chicken, the Toronto Maple Leafs, my church family, my children, my wife, and God, all of those are slightly different definitions of the word love.
If I were to say to my wife, “I love you in the same way that I love fried chicken” my sleeping arrangements for that evening might change. We toss that word around as if it means the same thing across the board, and it does not.
An excellent book I commend to you is by D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Get it, read it, digest it. I hope it will help you understand a little bit more about our culture and the attempted redefining of the word “love”.
How Love Looks
What does love look like then? Well, within a congregation it means love for church family members. We have an opportunity to love those who also love God and are loved by him. It is a glimpse of the life to come and an example to those who are outside the family of God.
We have an opportunity to truly define love for a society that does not understand love and misunderstands and misapplies the word repeatedly. We have the opportunity not just every Sunday morning but any time to show love for the church.
Fellow Christians, we have a family that’s bigger than just our biological family, and it is our privilege to show love to them.
Godly Love
How can we show that type of love?
First, because of God’s Spirit within us, we can love others with God’s type of love. In Hebrews 13:1 God says, “Let brotherly love continue”. There is a type of love that the author says should abound amongst the people of God and it is this familial love, this brotherly love, like the love (ideally) among biological siblings. We use that language oftentimes as Christians, “brother” or “sister”.
And it’s not just a throwaway term. It ought to have meaning. There is a bond among Christians, across time and space, or ought to be, that is stronger than just this particular group of people that gather in this particular place at a particular time weekly.
We ought to have a sense that we are family and that the things that we do for one another and the sacrifices that we make for each other even go beyond that of our own biological family.
You recall Jesus teaching the vast crowds and some individuals come and say to him, your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside and they’re calling for you (Matthew 12:46-50, Mark 3:31-35, Luke 8:19-21). They want to see you. According to Mark 3:21, they want to forcibly seize him and presumably take Him back home because they do not believe He is Who He says He is and instead believe He is “out of His mind”.
And what is Jesus’s response?
Not an abdication of his duties and his responsibilities for his biological family but what does he say? He looks around to the crowd and says, “Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers!” (Mark 3:34-35).
There’s a stronger bond (or ought to be) between believers in Jesus Christ than there is even amongst our biological families, even while not neglecting our biological families. And it’s His type of love, the love that sacrifices, the love that puts others’ interests above one’s own, that checks in on one another to see how they’re doing.
It’s the kind of love that encourages others in the same gospel direction, that holds one another accountable in our relationship with God.
Continuing Love
Secondly, this type of love, the author says, ought to continue. And there are at least a couple of things that I want us to see just from this word “continue”.
First of all, he’s referring to the fact that this type of love is already present among them. He’s no doubt thinking back to Hebrews chapter 10, where he says, you gladly put up with the giving away, the taking away of your property. They had received persecution from the governing authorities.
And he said, you gladly put up with having your property stolen from you, taken from you in order to serve one another. So, he says, continue in the type of love you’ve had for each other: encouraging each other, strengthening each other, sacrificing for each other, not looking out for number one, but looking out for each other. That type of love is the Philippians 2 Christlike love. He says you’ve already displayed that. Keep going.
But there’s something deeper here, and you miss it if you’re not looking carefully. At the end of Hebrews 12:26-27, the author says, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens…In order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain”.
The word “remain” is identical to the word “continue”.
So what does the author say?
We are looking forward to an unshakable kingdom. Right now, things are not very stable, and this side of glory they never will be. We’re not really sure of our investments. We’re not even sure of our freedoms at this point in our history. It’s not stable.
And these things that we can put our attention, time, resources, and energy into don’t last if they’re directed toward the things of this life. But what God calls us to are eternal things—the things that do last, the things that are unshakable, that cannot be removed.
Jesus says, “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matt. 6:20). We look forward to an unshakable kingdom, one that will remain after all of this earth is gone. And what is one of those things that will remain?
Brotherly love.
The love that we’re supposed to have for each other is one thing that will carry over into the new heaven and the new earth. Did you catch that? One of the things that we are practicing now, or ought to be, that will continue past time, one link between this age and the next, is brotherly love.
How Does Our Love Carry Over into Heaven?
What that means positively is that as we love each other as we are supposed to, one could say we are practicing for that which will be forever. We may say, “I don’t love that person”, but they could be your next-door neighbour forever.
What if we are not fond of a fellow Christian?
They might have an apartment next to yours in the new heavens and the new earth. C.S. Lewis says you never meet just an ordinary person because we’re all made in the image of God. Therefore, we’re all eternal beings. And as you interact with your fellow believers in Christ, you are interacting with a being that is going to live forever, one whom you’re going to be spending eternity with shoulder to shoulder.
There are no grudges in heaven.
So we can practice God’s love now and beautifully. We can show each other and to a watching world what it’s going to be like in the world to come. How does John put this? He starts with John 1:18 saying, “No one has ever seen God, but [Jesus] has made him known.” And then he picks up on that of 1 John 4:12 and he says, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”. People say, “I can’t see God, so I don’t believe in Him”.
We should be able to say, “Come with me to my church. You’ll see him there. This is what the love of God looks like”. It’s not the sappy, sentimental love that the world offers. It’s not that “anything goes, no holds barred” affirmation love that our society offers. It’s not the damaging, dehumanizing anti-love that our culture offers. It is true love. It is God’s type of love. And we should be able to see it in the interactions that we have with each other.
Negatively, it means that if you claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ and claim to have been a recipient of His love for you, yet you are withholding that love from someone else, you are actively working against Christ’s love. You are actively working against the type of love that will remain forever. You are actually showing that there’s a possibility you may not be part of the life to come. If you are not loving in this life with God’s love, how can you say that’s the type of love you’re looking forward to when this life is over?
Heaven is heaven because that is where the presence of God is. Heaven is where God’s loves—elf-sacrificial, selfless, getting down on your hands and knees and washing each other’s feet type of love resides. That’s the type of love that is eternal.
If you’re holding a grudge against somebody, even holding it for an extended period of time, that’s an indication that you don’t understand God’s love. You don’t understand how much he’s loved you, and you don’t seem to understand that hate will not exist in the life to come.
Heaven is heaven because that is where the presence of God is.
There are no grudges in heaven. There’s no bitterness in heaven. There’s no pride in heaven. There’s no unforgiveness in heaven. And if we say that heaven (or eternal life with Christ) is what we’re looking forward to, then why aren’t we living that way right now? And so the author of Hebrews says, “Love one another with God’s type of love”. Let brotherly love continue, now and on into eternity.
May God help us all to love as we have been loved and to love as we will love for all eternity. Those who do not know this love are watching, and seeing the reality of it is one of the most powerful witnesses to the veracity of the gospel; the absence of it then is one of the most damaging realities seemingly undermining the validity of the gospel.
This article is based on a sermon that you can listen to here.
