Having the Mind of Christ (eBook)

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

KNOWN BY LOVE?

This experience crystalized for us what the Scriptures state over and over: it’s all about love. During the last meal with his disciples, Jesus gives a final command that sums up his teaching. After washing their feet, embodying how they are to live out this command with one another, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35). Jesus demonstrates what love looks like, taking the place of the lowest servant, washing their feet—a sacrifice in preparation for his sacrifice on the cross—commands them to live in this love with one another, and tells them that their love will be a sign to everyone that they are disciples of Jesus.

The rest of the New Testament bears witness to the centrality of love for those who follow Jesus:

• Love is the principle on which all the law and prophets hang (Matthew 22:34-40).

• Love summarizes the entire law (Galatians 5:14).

• Love fulfills the entire law (Romans 13:8-10).

• Love is the goal of all instruction and training (1 Timothy 1:5).

• Love is how faith works itself out, and the only thing that counts (Galatians 5:6).

• Love is the way we know we’ve passed from death to life (1 John 3:14).

• Love is the way we are filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19).

• Love is who God is (!), and our love is evidence we are becoming more like God (1 John 4:8).

• And again, love is the way that everyone will know we are disciples of Jesus (John 13:35).

The essential quality by which a follower of Jesus is known is love. Scriptures are clear about this and our experience testifies to why this matters: without love, nothing else really matters.

However, evidence suggests that most Christians today are not known by love. When people outside the church are asked what Christians are “all about,” love is not at the top of the list. According to a 2019 study by Barna Research Group, almost half of the non-Christians interviewed had a “somewhat negative” or “very negative” opinion of evangelical Christians. Only 9 percent had a positive opinion, and fewer than 10 percent associated words like “caring,” “hopeful,” “friendly,” “encouraging,” “generous,” and “good-humored” with evangelicals. The words most often associated with evangelicals by non-Christians were “religiously conservative,” “politically conservative,” “narrow-minded,” “homophobic,” “misogynistic,” “puritanical,” “uptight,” and “racist.”1 When non-Christians were asked the reason for their negative perceptions of Christians, 67 percent said, “They are too pushy with their beliefs,” and 61 percent said, “They are hypocritical.”2 The study concludes with this: “Should evangelicals care about their reputation among non-Christians? The preponderance of evidence from Barna Group’s work suggests that most Christians think they should, and that younger Christians are even more concerned about this gap in perception.”3

CONFUSED ABOUT LOVE

Here’s where we are at today: Christians are known for a lot of things, but love doesn’t even make the top ten. The attribute Jesus said would be the defining mark of his disciples is not recognizable to a large segment of the population. How did we get here, so far off the mark that Jesus set for the church? One of the issues is that we’ve relegated love to the realm of the sentimental or romantic. Love is important for intimate relationships, dating, romance, and marriage, but for every other aspect of our lives, love isn’t given much consideration. We tend to think of love as a warm feeling of coziness, which is nice to have but doesn’t really do anything important when it comes down to it. We don’t think of love as powerful. We don’t trust love to get the job done. The quiet, pervasive assumption is that you’re going to need more than love to accomplish good things in the world, or grow in your faith, or lead others well.

You can hear this downgrading of love in the way that some people talk about the need to balance love and truth. We can’t just be loving, this way of thinking goes, we also must be truthful. We need love, yes, but we also need something else, something that will do some work that love can’t do. This reveals another problem we have with love: not only do we not trust it to get the job done, we also don’t even really know what it is! What kind of “love” do we imagine that wouldn’t tell the truth? Even those outside the mainstream Christian tradition who write about love acknowledge that love must include telling the truth.4 To claim that we must balance love with truth reveals that our vision of love is anemic; we think of love as a kind of niceness that’s willing to deceive others to placate them and make them feel better. A “love” that must be balanced with truth is a love that can’t tell the truth. Do we really think this is what Jesus commanded us to do? The fact that phrases like “balancing love and truth” usually sound wise to us and go unchallenged indicates how far we’ve strayed from the New Testament’s love-saturated vision for the Christian life.

THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE

In contrast to this paltry view of love that we carry around, the love of God revealed in Jesus is the most significant, fundamental power in the universe. Love is central to the way the New Testament envisions what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus. Jesus shows us what God’s love looks like and empowers us to love one another as he loved us. If we are going to be known by our love as disciples of Jesus, we must recover a robust, tangible, Jesus-shaped vision of love, and take love seriously as the goal and grounding of our faith. We must learn to believe that if we don’t have love, we don’t have anything. If we’re not growing in love—even if we are growing in our knowledge of God and moral behavior—we’re...