Love One Another, John 15:12-13

I guess we are all well aware of how difficult it is to love one another. At least how difficult it is to love every one another. Yet I have come to understand that the love that we express is not a love that we ‘feel’ as we might expect when we think of love. This is the love of a choice. It is a choice to love the one we are angry with, the one who disappoints us, the one who cuts us off in traffic, the one who uses four-letter words in front of our kids, the one who doesn’t pay attention to our food order and gets it wrong.

Choice to Love

John 15:12-13 says, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” So, it is a choice, and yes, even a command, to express the love that we receive from our Lord. It is a choice to show others that we love in all circumstances. It is the choice to let our Lord live in and through us. This choice is empathy, seeking the best for all of the one-anothers. This choice to love is perhaps one of the main reasons that we have difficulty with the priorities that we talked about just last week.

Expressing God’s Love

We mustn’t confuse loving one another with pleasing one another. This ‘loving one another’ is actually doing and being God’s will for one another. Since God lives in us, He expresses through us what is needed for others. We express to others the will and love of God for them. This would clearly include ‘tough love’ and would saying ‘no’ as well as correction and expressing priorities.

This love too needs to start close to home and extend outward. It needs to start with the people we see daily. Our family, our neighbors, the barista, the grocer. We can express this far away, in generosity toward the various agencies and organizations that are serving God around the world. But the Lord was clear when he said to love our neighbor, it starts close to home.