Courageous Love

The disciples shared the ministry of Jesus for about a thousand days, commonly stated as three years of ministry and instruction to the point of the crucifixion of Jesus.  That ministry was continued for about a month after the resurrection – to believers.  In the forty days until the ascension, Jesus was not always with the disciples.  Of all Christ’s earthly days, the Apostle John chose about fifteen in the thousand to write about.  About a third of the Gospel he wrote took place on one day.  John was taken with several themes for accent.  One theme was love.  He identified love as something in the nature of God, represented in the love of Christ to the disciples, and from that ministry to all persons.  We learn that love is a commandment of God for the person relating to God.  Love is in the nature of God, God becomes a vital factor in repairing human nature.  The Apostle John received it.  Peter lapsed for an hour at a fire, repented and recovered.

This love is not a matter of romance, or any other source than from God to the mind and understanding of the individual, who makes a decision to invite that love to his or her own nature.  When taken genuinely that love from God becomes a born-again event.  It becomes courageous, buttressing faith so firmly that it sustains the loving person through any experience of life even to death.  It becomes so firm that it creates a character in the nature of the individual that will not be betrayed even if its expression leads to death.  Its by-product, as John affirms it, is joy.  As the love of God is beyond emotional romance, or even mutuality of agreeable persons, so this joy is more than good humor or pleasantry of experience, but an inner joy that also dominates the nature of the person not lost in the negatives of natural life.  It is spiritually discerned.

One of the great adventures of life is to search the experience of divine love offered to the human being.  We talk of love, but we seldom really let down our mental thought into the depths of the well of God’s love so to learn how to activate that love in relationships.  It is a love that is so changing of human nature that the person can love enemies, can face all of life with courage and affirmation.  The proof to the individual is partly discovered in the joy it affords.  Faith needs that love to persuade others to faith.  Faith appears remote to the humanist’s orientation.  It seems too wishful, and there is a paucity of evidence in the natural order of things for finding genuine faith against false faith, that there must be an element that drives the person of faith – love that registers in the courage carried to others to show and communicate their faith.

A factor missed by students of the theme of the love of God that love leads to the acceptance of death in living out one’s faith, and may be likened to any form of death in life.  The taking on of God’s love may cost the life one enjoys in family, may cost acceptance in some social grouping – perhaps cost citizenship in the nation of one’s birth.  Even as this is being written some Christians are imprisoned, some executed, because they have embraced the gospel of Christ that is vital to the special love (agape) of God that reduces fear and offers love comfort (affirmation) to everyone – even enemies.  God’s love is the elixir of heaven that offers joy – forevermore.  A common saying is taken as a truism that at death: You can’t take anything with you.  It needs modifying words in the saying: You can’t take anything from nature with you.  You will not miss nature’s loss in the transition from human life, but surviving is the nature of God in those who chose the commandments of Christ to believe, serve, love – to become persons in Christ-likeness.  We tend to believe that the Old Testament (O.T.) offers commandments, and the New Testament (N. T.) offers grace.  The O. T. commandments mix grace with the understanding of justice relating to a divine standard.  The N.T. accents the grace of God but with commandments with demanding absolutes related to the joys of divine grace.  The grace of God to effectiveness makes clear the negatives of life that curse us.  They are overcome in divine love.  It is tough love.  The answer to hatred (terrorism) is love.  This assertion list is long, and may seem childlike to humanists.  In the affirmations of life there is joy, sometimes exacting a price, a price for faith truth, but when it does – joy cometh in the morning.