PRAYER OF CONSECRATION

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. 

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.

Jesus, we belong to you. 

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. 

Galatians 5:6

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

CONSIDER THIS

The other morning I drove by a church in our area that posts a weekly inspirational (or humorous) quote on the sign on their lawn. The letters are plastic and sometimes crooked, but it’s clear that someone has carefully curated each word to provide some benefit to those who pass by. This particular day I drove by quickly, almost missing the message. There on the sign were these words: “Love as Jesus loves.”

We’ve already talked much about love in our series so far. Paul won’t talk about our unity with God in Christ without bringing it up. Paul won’t even talk about being a follower of Jesus without putting our embodiment of Christ’s love front and center. 

And, in everyday life, love is a word that holds more space in the average person’s life than most.

We all want to love and be loved, give love and receive love. But love, as a word, can mean many, many things. The ancient Greeks had multiple words for love, enabling them to distinguish between meanings in various contexts. The English language, however, has one word for love and a few other variations at best. That limitation has had tremendous implications for us today. 

What we mean by love when we speak of it is everything. In our love-language-saturated world, especially on social media and in our identity-disoriented culture, God’s vision of love penetrates and defines the meaning of this powerful little word. 

And that is what Paul wants to talk about in Galatians 5:26. Some of the believers have retreated into a law-powered vision of closeness with God. Paul wants to remind them of a love-powered vision of closeness with God—and the mission of love that flows from it.

“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”

The word for love here is agape. Agape is a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit kind of love that could be understood to enfold and define all other visions of love. It is not simply an emotional love, marked by acceptance, kindness, or affection. Rather, it is an unconditional assignment of value to another, a love that puts others first, that deeply loves and appreciates the depth and breadth of a person. It is cruciform, cross-shaped love; the kind of love that calls another to a higher good at the same time it enfolds them. Agape love can accept, challenge, serve, and heal—all in the same moment.

But what does that love look like in practice? Paul is trying to say that it looks like Jesus. And Jesus, whose Spirit is in us, loves in the way of 1 Corinthians 13 and Galatians 5:22–23. His love overflows into joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s the Spirit’s life at work within us.

Joe Dongell, in his incredible book Sola Sancta Caritas, articulates John Wesley’s understanding of how love works:

Wesley is saying something more than that love is important, a claim with which all Christians could agree without dispute. Rather, Wesley has a specific understanding of how love works across the whole Christian life, and how love is the operational center of all things. . . . First, the love advocated by Jesus and his apostles cannot be defined by general human intuition, or by cultural sensibilities, or by finding some supposed ethical overlap between all the world’s religions. . . . Second, we must stop equating Christian love with good actions, even if those good actions are done in the name of Jesus. . . . Third, love’s origin is God himself, or as it is expressed in 1 John 4:7, “Love is of God.” . . . Fourth, if love is a gift from God, then we must seek to receive love from God, the very love we are commanded then to express both to God and others. . . . Fifth, the love poured out by God through the Spirit is a mighty force set loose on the deepest chambers of the heart and community, manifesting a host of powerful internal and external effects.¹

Because this book is so helpful to our understanding of love, here is one more quote:

If love fills the heart (and by its nature fulfills the whole law of God), then the heart so filled with love has “no room left in it” (metaphorically speaking) for evil intentions and designs. . . . Then among the external effects of infusion with God’s love will be mission and service of every sort. For to be filled with love from God is to be energized by the same passion that has been energizing God’s whole redemptive mission.²

The only thing that ultimately matters, according to Paul, is faith expressing itself in the world by acts of love in accord with a Jesus-kind of love. His love is the way forward for us all.

Today, you can express your faith through acts of love because Jesus is in you—loving others through you.

THE PRAYER 

Lord Jesus, I am in you and you are in me. I want my faith and the way I carry it in my relationships to be expressed as love. Show me how to love and accept, but also how to care for and challenge another. I want love and truth to move together in my life. In Christ Jesus, I pray, amen.

THE QUESTIONS

How have different visions of love impacted your relationships? Is there any way you could model a love that is a Jesus-kind of love?

For the Awakening,
Dan Wilt 

NOTES

1. Joseph Dongell, Sola Sancta Caritas (Franklin: Seedbed Publishing, 2006), 25–33.
2. Ibid., 34–35.

Subscribe to get this in your inbox daily and please share this link with friends.