Power of Love

5 min read

3 We ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love all of you have for one another is increasing. 4 Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.
— 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4

The clearest evidence of salvation in people is not how “holy” they might act or speak. It’s not how “well-behaved” they might be. It’s not even how much good works they might do. Of course, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to pursue holiness, to act morally, and to do good works. But the clearest evidence of salvation is perhaps the degree to which we love one another in a community and whether we persevere in faith through persecution.

Hopefully, we would never have to face physical or material persecution—even if Christians face cultural persecution to a certain degree in our society. But I do pray that we would grow in our love for one another here in Canvas. And I praise God because we have been growing in our love for one another.

In any given community, loving one another is not natural or easy. Our default mode is to be self-centered and even selfish. We might “love” someone if they satisfy our needs or even if they do not get in the way of our satisfying our needs. But as soon as they get in the way of our self-centered agenda, our “love” gets thrown out the window.

There are many obstacles to love in a Christian community. Every person, in some way, is a potential obstacle to love in a Christian community.

And if loving one another is not easy, increasing in our love for one another is even harder.

Loving one another, and especially increasing in loving one another, takes perseverance in loving one another. We have to persevere in love.

Perseverance in love takes time. A lot of it. We have to learn how to love people of different personalities, especially the EGRs in our lives. We have to train ourselves to be patient with others. We have to train ourselves to actively love people who may have hurt us. We have to train ourselves to forgive people who may have done us wrong on multiple occasions.

Maybe our greatest challenge is that hurt people hurt people. And we all carry hurts in our lives, and those hurts get manifested in the things that we do and the things that we say to one another. When we carry hurts in our lives, we propagate hurt in ourselves in and in others.

The key to persevering in love, the remedy to the hurt we carry, is to know the love of Christ.

For this reason, I kneel before the Father in heaven, from Whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen us with power (ability) through His Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And I pray that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. In Jesus’s name. Amen.