We’ve been looking at being renewed in Love. I wonder what you think about when you hear that? Maybe we’ll end up feeling better – feeling more loved? Maybe that will make us feel more like loving others.

The Bible has a lot to say about love. It tells us that God is love. How he loved even before the foundation of the world, of a love that existed within the three persons of the Trinity. 

That he is the origin of love, so that we love because he first loved us. 

That’s massively reassuring – because it means that when we love we’re doing something that has always been there.

And the love that the Bible talks about in these grand terms is more than romantic love. More than friendship or a relationship based on mutual attraction. Those types of love tend to be reactive – how we respond to another person, and how we feel.

The love that finds its origin in God is proactive. So it can be commanded. In fact, Jesus sums up the whole Old Testament law in two commands – Love God (with all your heart, strength and mind), and your neighbour as yourself. He later adds a new commandment – to love one another.

A definition of this kind of love might be something along the lines of ‘seeking the best for another, whatever the personal cost’.

Now we may find that we feel an affection for another person, and so want to seek their best. But we may not. When Jesus tells us to ‘love our enemies’, it’s unlikely he was expecting us to have much affection for them. Which means it’s possible to love someone we don’t like.

And that reflects the character of God. He made us in his image, but we have all turned away. We’ve rebelled, we’ve sinned. Sin causes a separation between God and us. Our essential problem is that God is holy and we are not. God’s holiness means he cannot even look upon sin. But despite that, he still loves us. Look at Romans 5:8. He loves us so much that he sent his Son, who willingly came to take on the penalty for our sin so that we might be reconciled. 

Many of us have probably heard that a thousand times, which carries a danger that we become overly familiar with it. I remember someone once saying to us that as a church we ‘never seemed to move beyond the Gospel’. I don’t think it was intended as such, but I took that as a compliment! Because we should never move beyond that Good News. I think maybe that’s what Paul had in mind when he prayed in Ephesians 3:18 that they might

“have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”.

Taking this on board, thinking it through, meditating on it will have consequences. The first is that when we appreciate the great love that God has for us, we will want to love him back. Our feelings will change. How do we love God? Jesus said this “If you love me you will keep my commandments”. We obey as a response of love to an initiative of love.

And a further consequence is that we will love God’s people. In my first year at university a guy called Roger used to come and try to talk to me about Christianity. I didn’t exactly push him away, but I found his visits a little irritating. But it was at the end of that year that I became a Christian. 

At the start of the next year, I’d moved to a different hall of residence, and Roger had moved off campus. A few weeks into the term I bumped into him at a local shop and was really pleased to see him. I was actually surprised at my own reaction! It did not come from me, but was my first taste of the Holy Spirit giving me a love for God’s people.

That doesn’t mean that I immediately get on with everyone – far from it! But in a sense though, that’s important. Because it’s easy to love people we like. But when we don’t agree with, or particularly like another person, we have to decide to still look out for their best. And the strange thing is that often, when we ‘do good’ for them, and pray for them, God will turn our hearts, and our feelings towards them change.

And the additional, or extra-special, love for one another – other Christians – is important. Francis Schaeffer called love ‘the mark of the Christian’. Jesus said that our love for one another will be evidence to the world that we belong to him (John 13:35). For people to see love for one another they have to be able to see actions (see 1 John 3:18).

So a renewal in love has to start with a good look at God – who he is and what he has done for us. As the Holy Spirit burns his Word into our hearts, they will change. Instead of being hostile to God, we will warm towards him. And we will begin to see the world and its people through his eyes and begin to understand (or ‘see in a mirror dimly’ 1 Corinthians 13:12) the love that God has for his people and the world.