"Where There Is Love, There Is A Christian"

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 

I John 4:7-8 New King James Version

Really? Everyone who genuinely loves? 

The Bible is a big book, an inspired collection of wisdom covering a multitude of subjects. But can its entire message be summed up in one simple word as the apostle John appears to be saying? Is this divine love (Greek: agape) the essence of who God is and the one great sign of who God's people are? 

We find a similar distillation of the Bible's message in the familiar words, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind and with all your strength" the first and greatest commandment. And according to Jesus the second command, "You must love your neighbor as your very self," is equal to it. The two mandates are inseparable.

The apostle Paul claims that this love sums up the entire Law and the Prophets, that is, the entire Hebrew Bible. He lists love as the first of the nine-fold "fruit of the Spirit, and ends the so-called "love chapter" (I Corinthians 13) with "And now these three things remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.  The writer of the book of James calls the "love your neighbor as yourself" command the "perfect law"and the "royal law," and thus the queen of all the commandments.

We could debate whether love is a natural human trait or whether it is a truly supernatural one. As infants we are totally ego-centric. The whole world is perceived as being all about us, as revolving around us, existing for us. 

Love, on the contrary, is the ability to recognize ourselves as being a part of the Other, with God as the One to whom we owe our life and breath, and to see ourselves as a beloved part of all others with whom we share the precious gift of life. Is this natural, or does it call for a profound transformation, a radical rebirth that enables us to love all others in the extravagant and sacrificial way God does?

According to Jesus, in the end we will all be judged by whether we have cared for the hungry, thirty, homeless and imprisoned, as we would care for ourselves and our own. But being able to consistently live that way depends on whether God's gracious love has truly transformed us to love unselfishly as God does.

As the 16th century reformer Menno Simons wrote,“Without this love, it is all vain, whatever we may know, judge, speak, do or write. The property and fruit of love is meekness, kindness, not envious, not crafty, not deceitful, not puffed up, nor selfish. In short, where there is love, there is a Christian.”