Community: Love in the Community

Throughout the account of Jesus' life that John wrote, he speaks of Jesus and love quite often.  This is especially apparent on the Thursday night of Passover, the night before Jesus would be betrayed, arrested, tried, and eventually crucified.  As He spent time talking with His disciples, one point that He really seemed to want to get across to them was the necessity of showing love to one another.

That's why you will find Jesus telling them to love one another repeatedly throughout chapters 13-16.  You can see it in places like John 15:9-10, John 15:12-13, John 15:17, and many more times throughout.  And in doing this, Jesus shows us the importance of love for one another in our faith community.

Yet, love is something that we westerners seem to have forgotten how to do.  You watch movies or read books, and the prevailing sense of what love is is some kind of attraction or pleasure.  That's because we have so thoroughly watered down what "love" means that we no longer know how we can love one another.  After all, if "love" has sexual or pleasurable connotations, then what does it mean to love our brothers and sisters in Jesus?  What does it mean to love Jesus, for that matter?  If we're looking for some pleasurable feeling in doing this, then it's no wonder we aren't finding or experiencing that kind of love in our church communities.

That's because love finds its base in a verbal form, not in a noun form.  Love is action, not some feeling, or something we get from another.  Love is something that we do.  Love is commitment.  Love is caring.  Love is, when needed, putting the needs of another before our own needs.  Love is looking around at our brothers and sisters and seeing that we need them and they need us far more than some kind of sense of pleasure.  In many respects, love is a commitment to care.

Maybe that's why we in the west have such a hard time of knowing how to love one another.  We're told to look out for our own selves first and foremost, and then we're told that love is some pleasurable feeling that we should pursue at all costs.  Is it any wonder, then, that our faith communities (and in many cases, our families) are falling apart due to lack of love?

Who do you know that needs your love toward them today?  How can you go about showing that love to them?