The Preeminence of Love
John 17:1–26
That the love with which you have loved me may be in them. John 17:26
We see the preeminence of love readily if we look at it in reference to the other marks of the church. What happens when you take love away from them? Suppose you take joy and subtract love from it? What do you have? You have hedonism. You have an exuberance in life and its pleasures, but without the sanctifying joy found in relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Subtract love from holiness. What do you get? You get self-righteousness, the kind of hypocritical virtue that characterized the Pharisees of Christ’s day.
Take love from truth, and you have a bitter orthodoxy, the kind of teaching that is right but that does not win anyone.
Take love from mission, and you have imperialism. It is colonialism in ecclesiastical garb. We have seen much of that in recent history.
Take love from unity, and you soon have tyranny. This develops in a hierarchical church where there is no compassion for people nor a desire to involve them in the decision-making process.
That is one side of it. On the other hand, express love in relation to God and man and what do you find? You find all the other marks of the church following. What does love for God the Father lead to? Joy! Because we rejoice in God and in what he has so overwhelmingly done for us. What does love for the Lord Jesus Christ lead to? Holiness! Because we know that we will see him one day and will be like him; therefore “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). What does love for the Word of God lead to? Truth! Because if we love the Word, we will study it and therefore inevitably grow into a fuller appreciation and realization of God’s truth. What does love for the world lead to? Mission! We have a message to take to the world. Again, where does love for our Christian brothers and sisters lead us? To unity! Because by love, we discern that we are bound together in that bundle of life that God himself has created within the Christian community.
Is it any wonder that Jesus ends his final discourses and prayer (undoubtedly spoken within the hearing of the disciples) with this emphasis? Hardly! Rather, we expect it, for it is as though Jesus, in anticipation of the writing of the fourth Gospel, could go back to the beginning of this fourth section in chapter 13, verse 1 (where we read, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he showed them the full extent of his love” NIV), and then conclude, “Yes, and here at the very end of my discourses and prayer, I am going to talk about precisely that, for love is the most important characteristic.
Taken from Come to the Waters by James Boice ISBN 9798887790954 used with permission from P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ 08865
Scripture quotations are from the ESV (the Holy Bible English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.