Love is of course at the core of our faith. Love sent Jesus to the cross. We love Him because He first loved us. God, indeed, is love and as such love is centre of it all. To make it clear we read that the greatest commandment and the summary of the law is that we first of all love God and second only to that is that we love each other.
Here Paul gives one of many aspects of the kind of love we supposed to have. He gives a more full account in 1 Corinthians 12. Here he simply says ‘let your love be without hypocrisy.’
Both the modern word hypocrisy and the older word dissimulation have the notion of false motivation or intent. Not only are we to love, but we are to love with a pure love where our only desire in loving is to meet the needs of another. It has nothing to so with us. We don’t love to be loved back. We don’t give to get.
That means that we don’t feign love for people in order to ‘convert’ them to our way of thinking or to meet a standard or to say what a wonderful Christian we are. The love of Christ constrains us to love others with the love of Christ and if we do that we are share our lives and our faith with them simply because we want to see them revel in the joy of God’s love. When we learn to love that way sharing our faith will be the most natural thing in the world because it is the purest evidence of true love.
Love is of God. He who does not love with this pure love is not really of God.
How do you and I love?
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