Love of Christ
6 min read
33 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
36 Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”
John 13:33-36
The disciples had been following Jesus ever since He started His ministry. All along, Jesus had been teaching them what it truly means to follow Him. Here, Jesus says, “You can’t follow me where I am going now, but you will later.”
Until later comes, His disciples are to follow Him by obeying a new command: Love one another. That is our testimony and our witness that we follow Jesus Christ.
Loving one another was not a “new” command, strictly speaking (Leviticus 19:18). What was new is that Jesus is now the model, the motivation, and the manifestation of the love that the command requires.
His humble and sacrificial love is not something that comes naturally to us. That is because human love is always motivated by ego and pride to some degree. Ego and pride are of the devil and have no place in the character of the Lord of the universe.
Jesus is always motivated by love (John 3:16), because God is love (1 John 4:16), and He is God. God’s love is always concerned for us. There is no need whatsoever for God to be concerned for His Self. He is God. And so God’s love for us is always pure.
Christ’s love is the model of love that we are to manifest toward one another and toward the world as our testimony.
Can I say (with conviction) that there is no need whatsoever for me to be concerned for my “Self” because I have the gift of eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ? I wonder whether such “Self”-lessness is even possible in this broken world. But the impossibility of “Self”-lessness is not justification for “Self”-ishness.
Manifesting the love of Christ is foreign to the world. The source must be divine. And so manifesting the love of Christ is our witness of Christ exactly because such love is foreign to the world—and also because every single soul hungers for and needs such love.
The yearning for such love is what got me saved. I experienced the purity of Christ’s love—a love that I never felt before. Even when it was manifested through impure human beings, His love radiated through, and I felt the warmth of His unconditional love.
The love of Christ is the goal. Where the love of Christ is, there be Christ. The love of Christ is the strategy and the tactics. Where we love like Christ, there be Christ. The love of Christ is the vision and the planning. Where we see and seek the love of Christ, there be Christ.
Everything else is secondary—and must not even come close to the priority and the primacy of loving one another in Christ Jesus.
How does the love of Christ influence, guide, and transform my thinking, acting, and feeling?
Father, Every day I fall short of the love of Christ. But You know my weakness, and Your remedy is to love me unconditionally and to love me more. I thank You for Your hand upon my soul. Your love heals me and cause me to love as You have loved me. Make me to love You and to love others more like Christ, so that I may be able to declare boldly and without shame: Jesus Christ is Lord, and Jesus Christ is alive in me. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
