Someone said it plainly last night, when we were reading Paul’s “Love Chapter,” and thinking about why love is better than all the good things we do.  She said “If we aren’t doing these things for love, then why would we do them?”  Indeed.  If Christ’s love is not the energy flowing through my heart and mind, then all that is left is me in there,  doing the right things but for the wrong reasons….a counterfeit of love.

Easy to slide into maybe, because the needs inside are so natural and we hardly have to think about hunger to grab for more to fill it.  It just happens.  Being nice to others makes you feel better about yourself.  Using your abilities in the church builds relationships.  Helping others gives meaning to your life.  How easily I could slip into the habit of doing these right things all by myself, to gain the reward….I’d be running on empty, filling my tank with the little I earn and spending it right away again, two steps forward and three steps back.  No wonder Paul says you end up with nothing.

See, the love Paul is writing about is real and eternal; someone said that last night too: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)  Not just that He is a loving person but that His very nature is love, in perfect completeness, in infinite measure.  He defines what love is.  He is the only way we know love at all.  Because He loved us first, we can love…not just to the limit of our own abilities but with His own limitless supply.  His love should be the motivator and guide for all the “good things” we do.

Real love is a thankful response to His love on the cross.  Real love uses the gifts He has given to grow up others in the faith, wants to please Him, and depends on Him for the ability to do it.  And because His love is real and eternal, the good things we do under its guidance will last for eternity and work for our own eternal good as well.  If I am depending on Him I can run on a full tank and still always have room for more, because He never stops giving and the more I have of Him, the more I want.

Our challenge for the coming week is to read 1 Corinthians 13 once a day.  Lord, as these familiar words settle into our minds this week, help us to seek out “the most excellent way” wholeheartedly, and not be satisfied with any counterfeits.  As we dwell on the love You show us, may love be our thankful response to You and others.

“…if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”  (1 Corinthians 13:2b-3)

It seems appropriate that we are studying from the well-known “love chapter” this week, that on Valentine’s Day I am reading “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7).  Yesterday we had lunch with a couple who were celebrating their 58th wedding anniversary, and we saw this enduring kind of love: his bouquet of flowers on the table, her slicing the chicken and heaping the salads, passing bread, and sharing of words and laughter over strong coffee in tall mugs, deep red on the inside.  It was rich, their life together– and if you knew their story of regrets and celebrations, even richer.

Will we make it to 58 years?  I can’t really picture that at all, but looking at them I can see how it comes slowly, one year after another piling up… and both of them enduring, bearing life and one another, and still believing in what they are growing.  Paul’s Love Chapter provides the road map.  Love is patient, love is kind…in all those days that never go the way you expect them to.  Love… does not envy or boast… because this relationship is what we have been given and what we do with it will have eternal repercussions.  Love… does not insist on its own way…laying down our lives over and over as we imitate the Beloved One who laid down His life for us.

I forget sometimes that love doesn’t come naturally, the way media tells us it will.  To hear them tell the story, it is a helpless landslide that should take us by surprise and keep us breathless and celebrating.  The way Paul tells the story, it is a daily choice to seek something that matters most of all, a daily bending of my will to obey my Father, a constant transformation of my shallow desires and emotions into the likeness of Jesus’ roaring ocean depth of love.  It may take me 58 years… and more… to figure that out.

This Wednesday night we talked about what it means to bear fruit, to abide in Christ, metaphors that Jesus gave us for living with Him.  How do I abide in Him?  How do I bear fruit?  What does that even look like for a woman living in a small town in western Pennsylvania?  Spiritual metaphors, yes, for spiritual realities, but we must slow down and listen like children again, to understand the everyday stories of truth He told us.

Trees make the fruit they were created to bear, from the stuff of their own makeup.  An apple tree makes apples because the life and stuff of apples flows through its branches.  And if a branch is torn off by the winds, it will die and stop producing apples, because it no longer has that supply from the tree.

Christ-followers produce the fruit they were created to bear, from the stuff of a new creation in Christ.  A Christian makes good fruit because the Holy Spirit flows through her, producing what He wants– the likeness of the Savior– transforming an ordinary sinner into someone ablaze with Christ’s beauty.  And if she is separated from the Source by the stress and busyness and distractions of this world, she will wither up and stop producing anything good, because she no longer has that supply of Christ’s life and righteousness.

Bearing fruit is intensely personal then, not just checking the right things off a list, or trying harder.  Bearing fruit happens in relationship with the One who grows it in us.  As Bruce Wilkinson says, “you bear inner fruit when you allow God to nurture in you a new, Christlike quality….You bear outward fruit when you allow God to work through you to bring Him glory.” (Secrets of the Vine, 96)  No wonder fruit only grows when we abide in Christ, our eyes fastened on Him, our hearts entwined in His, our souls turned upward listening for His still small voice.

“And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

Our lesson this week is about growing in love by abiding in Christ.  Both those things take all my effort.  I have read dozens of books on marriage and family and counseling and understanding all the ways our minds turn as they do.  They use so many words to describe relationships and the managing of them, to explain how to balance, how to understand all the complexities.  Few of them are brave enough (or truthful enough) to tell me that love will take all of me, everything I have and more.

Because love is not a 50-50 relationship, no matter how you look at it.  It takes all you have and all the other person has, to make it work.  Not a partnership but a self-giving,  and the joy is in the willingness of both parties.  Learning more love is the hardest thing we do in life, because dying to self is never easy.

Abiding is no easier.  It sounds peaceful, like a cottage in the woods with flower vines growing up the front, something quiet and quaint and soothing.  Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.  Abide in my love.” (John 15:9)  It sounds like a good place to live.

But in the next verse He explained what abiding means: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”  Abiding is obedience.  Obedience is something I am still learning, along with trust– sometimes quick and joyful, sometimes wrestling with old pain, sometimes bending my thoughts and choices around Your mold with all my strength like red-hot metal on the forge.  But I follow along after You and listen for Your voice… “just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”  I can’t think of a better place to live.  But it is not quaint and soothing.  It is dying.

And all this giving and dying for what?  Again, Jesus spells it out for me: “…apart from me you can do nothing….Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you….By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples….As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you….that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full….I have called you friends.” (John 15:5,7-9,11,15)  If I am going to grow in love and abide in Christ it will take all my effort and all my desire– no careless living or peaceful existing– and yet ironically it will fill me up with the very things I need the most, the things I absolutely cannot live without.

The books aren’t wrong, they just don’t push far enough into the matter to see clearly.  They smooth over how rugged the choice to do right can actually be.  They assume that all of us want to give and to get, so if everyone gives half we will all remain even.  The fact is, I don’t always want to give, and the fear of not remaining even makes me withhold even more.

Love is an all-out business.  “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.” (John 15:13-14)  It’s going to take all you have.

“The abiding believer is the only legitimate believer.”  (John MacArthur)

“…you can’t wonder why love’s wearing thin when you’re wearing a thick layer of self.” (Ann Voskamp)

Mondays are hard to love.  The week stretches out long, feeling overwhelmed before it starts.  People stretch patience out long, and snap back disgruntled and tired, after the weekend.  Snow-gray skies stretch overhead, coloring everything dull.  But Jesus whispers “Love your neighbor as yourself…as I have loved you.”  This is where it starts, on Mondays, with the laundry and the to-do lists and the back-to-work routine.

Love isn’t brilliant or exciting on Mondays.  It is persevering. It is folding up carefully of shirts and tongues and moments, and offering grace.  It is steady.  It doesn’t rock off balance just because life does, or shift with the weather.  It is humbling.  It bends to wash dirty footprints on the kitchen floor, to answer the phone with a listening ear, to help with spelling words, to set the dinner table.

Love on Mondays is how we know for sure that this is for real: that God’s love is poured out in our hearts and we are changed because of it.  Love on Mondays is how we prove our love for Him and give thanks back to Him. Love on Mondays is the way to show the watching world that God’s love is big enough to change the world, one day at a time.

“Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him….For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.”  (1 John 5:1, 3)

“Loving means losing control of our schedule, our money, and our time.  When we love we cease to be the master and become a servant [of Christ].”  (Paul Miller)

In studying for our lesson this week, about the new commandment to love, I was reminded that this isn’t new at all.  It is the ancient command from God, given to His people, the first instructions on how to live in covenant with Him, how to live as covenant people with one another: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deut.6:4-5)  And “…you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Lev. 19:18)

From the beginning, this was the standard for God’s people.  What Jesus added was the measure of it: His own life example.  “…just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”  (John 13:34)  Something we know, but forget we know, need to be brought face-to-face with repeatedly.  “Just as I have loved you…” means messy all-out everyday giving of hands’ work and body’s strength, food for hungry mouths and hungry hearts, slowing to listen, being burden-bearers alongside, even when we feel the weight of our own need.

Maybe especially when we feel our own need, because that is what self-sacrifice is all about, giving up our needs in order to serve someone else’s, and trusting God to meet our own.  Our homes could be incubators for this God kind of love…. the needs are endless there, and our hearts are knit to these people, and in the chaotic ordinary moments of living together there are endless opportunities to give up self and become a servant.

I feel small next to Jesus’ standard.  “As I have loved you…”?.  With enough willpower and discipline I can do good to others.  But how can I pour out love like Jesus did, give as much as He did, and how especially to the difficult ones?  I don’t have it in me unless He creates it in me, transforms me into someone new– someone more like Him.  This is what A.B. Simpson called “living the Christ-life” and what the apostle Paul meant when he said “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Rom.6:11)

Then come,  Lord Jesus…have more of me so I can have more of You, and fill up this small dry heart with the abundance of Your Spirit, and let it pour out into all my everyday places.  If I am to obey this new commandment, I need Your flow of Living Water renewed continually.

“You are my supply, my breath of life, still more awesome than I know….and all of You is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need. You satisfy me with Your love and all I have in You is more than enough.” (Enough, Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio)

True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person – Jesus Christ.  ( J.C. Ryle)

Last Wednesday we started Cynthia Heald’s Becoming a Woman who Loves study.  For the next three months or so we will be studying God’s agape love and our debt to love others once we experience His.

At some point someone shared how much she appreciated God’s kind patience and gentleness and I joked that it often seemed more like a tidal wave.  We laughed while knowledge flashed through the room of the hard places He brings us to: the consequences of our waywardness, long weary illnesses, grief in the night, pouring out the heart in prayers that seem unanswered, mother’s burdens for her children.  And His love, mysterious and relentless, pursuing us in the midst of it all, calling us to come close and worship anyway, because He is faithful and good, and He never stops loving us.  As C.S.Lewis wrote, “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character (The Problem of Pain, p.42).” More like a crashing ocean than a warm fuzzy blanket, but larger and more real because of it.

So as we dive into this exploration of God’s agape love, I feel sure it will not be weeks spent on feel-good sentiments and placid assurances of a Father’s acceptance.  He is a loving Father, but He is God Almighty, the Maker and Ruler of the universe.  The love He calls us to is “the rugged choice to do the right thing” (Jon Tal Murphree).  The Beloved One we follow hung on the cross and in the midst of His suffering called out forgiveness.  As we study, may our own love grow more rugged and strong in the everyday places of life.

“He is jealous for me, loves like a hurricane; I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.  When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory, and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great Your affections are for me.  Oh, how He loves us….” (John McMillan, How He Loves)

I am not a risk-taker by nature.  I am a planner, an organizer, a gatherer of information.  I enjoy routine and familiarity.  But this business of following Christ, following the Call, it means stepping out to the end of the limb over and over again, following His beckoning into the unknown and, like a child, expecting Him to catch me.

Not that I’ve learned to climb out fearlessly.  When I was new to all this, I thought I would get over the fear with experience and prayer and maturity.  So I pressed on through sleepless nights, wobbly knees, and weight-on-my-chest panic attacks, calls for help flung heavenward, hanging on for dear life, thinking that someday I could be polished and confident out there on my own.

By now I have accepted the fact that the fear is not going anywhere.  It is part of my brokenness, and instead I have learned to feel it, recognize it for what it is, and step blindly into the unknown future anyway.  He is big enough to carry all that fear, and big enough to catch me too, and His plans are big enough that I wouldn’t miss out on them for anything, just for the sake of feeling safe.  Because nothing is safe in this world except it is in His arms.

So when I started hearing the small voice saying it was time to write again, and it didn’t fade with time, I looked for a Where and a When, even while the fears were talking in my head about what people would think– and what if I tried and failed– and what if I were transparent and it was all for nothing.  And one day it was quite clear there was a new branch to climb out onto.

Every week in our small group I meet with a roomful of women who are transparent about loving Jesus and wanting to grow more like Him; we laugh and sometimes cry, and share our struggles, and study God’s Truth to find our way through this life.  It’s a personal risk, connecting with other women in a small group, but it is well worth it.  In the between times, we pray for one another and think about what we have learned so far, and I will write my own thoughts here for them, and for all of us women who are following after Christ into the unknown.  Because it is worth it.