Certain patterns of behavior are associated with discipleship or growing in maturity in our relationship with Christ.
These patterns, classically called spiritual disciplines, are the means of grace God has given us that help us to develop intimacy with him. But I’ve begun to think that there’s a neglected component of discipleship.
Is it fasting? Prayer? Scripture memory? Solitude? There’s still another component of walking with Jesus out there that gets little press compared to some of these others—love.
What does the greatest command hinge upon? Love. What will be the defining characteristic of Jesus’ followers? Love. What won’t pass away, even after faith and hope are gone? Love.
Love is the mark of the disciple. But here’s the problem: You can’t teach love. You can teach how to effectively memorize Scripture. Similarly, you can teach someone how to fast. You can teach someone how to pray. But how do you teach someone to love? It isn’t quite so easy to create a formula around that.
But that difficulty surrounding love also points to its uniqueness in the marks of one who follows Jesus: This is perhaps the one element of discipleship that can’t be faked.
Surely there are many, according to Jesus, who might perform miracles, drive out demons, and do all other kinds of religious things that won’t enter the kingdom of heaven. We can become adept at “playing disciple” by our sheer acts of will. We can even force ourselves into positions of service and postures of generosity.
But love? Genuine love? That’s something you can’t manufacture.
Nevertheless, Jesus said “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Despite this statement, all our current metrics of discipleship focus on things like knowledge of the Bible and time spent in prayer. Though these are important marks of discipleship, love is infinitely more difficult (and perhaps impossible) to quantify.
You can will yourself to study. You can force yourself to pray. You can buckle down and make yourself memorize Scripture. But nobody ever loved by gritting his teeth and deciding to love.
It’s not like that.
Love is grown over time, and like most other things, our appetite for love grows through exercises of the will. That is, we choose to engage in activities of love even when we don’t feel like it because we believe that in doing so, our love will grow.
But ultimately, even these actions can’t force us to love. This is why the command of Jesus in Matthew 22:37-40 is so crushing: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
It’s crushing because in just a few sentences Jesus gives us the greatest command that all other commands hinge upon and yet it is the defining characteristic of discipleship.
It’s because love—true love—can only come from a true, vibrant, and constant experience of the gospel. The gospel is what love is—that’s the true measure of love. And love begets love.
When we truly encounter the defining love of God in Jesus Christ, it changes everything about us.
We’re given a new heart. New desires. New capacity. We’re awakened to the things to which we’d previously been blind and suddenly, we find our hearts swelling in ways we never dreamed possible. We find ourselves, having been made new in the gospel, responding in kind. We actually begin to obey the command of Jesus. We love God. We love others. We do so not in a manufactured way, but out of a genuine encounter with Jesus that first gives love and then pushes it out.
Those who truly love demonstrate they’ve been loved and are growing in their understanding of the great love of God in Christ.
No wonder Jesus said love, more than anything else, would mark those who follow Him.
Article courtesy of HomeLife Magazine
Michael Kelley is the Director of Discipleship at Lifeway. He and his wife, Jana, have three children and live in Nashville, Tenn. Keep up with Michael on his blog at MichaelKelleyMinistries.com or on Twitter @_MichaelKelley.