Christians, I have a habit of saying, have two things to give to this world: the gospel and the love of Christ. The primary focus of New Commandment Men’s Ministries is on the latter. We train men to apply the love of Christ to their widowed and single parents in their churches and communities.
But the question is, how do we know when we are loving these people with the love of Christ? In order for any men’s team ministry to answer that question, we must explicitly teach our men about Christ’s love so they can clearly identify when they are practicing it.
Fortunately, Scripture describes how Christ loved in very concrete terms. Jesus didn’t just teach about love, he practiced it. Even God himself “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”1
As many of you know, I find it helpful to define Christ’s love in terms of the qualities that differentiate it from the kind of love the world practices. I call these “the three unique qualities of Christ’s love” and they’re based on the core Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption. Let’s review these qualities.
- Personal Identification – We love someone the way Christ loves us when we identify with them personally so that we come to know and understand them. In the Incarnation, Christ identified with us by becoming a human being just like us, making it possible, among other things, to become our great high priest who “knows our infirmities.”
- Commitment – We love someone the way Christ loves us when we commit to them. In the Incarnation, God not only became a human being, he became a human being permanently. Christ is “God very God and man very man.” There will now never be a time in eternity future when he will not be a man, thus proving that love never fails.
- Sacrifice – We love someone the way Christ loves us when we sacrifice for them in their time of need. In Redemption, God met a need we could not meet. Christ paid the price for our sin by dying on the cross. And now God commands us to do the same for fellow believers: “By this perceive we the love of God, that he laid down his life for us. And we ought also to lay down our lives for the brethren.”2
We can also describe these three qualities in a negative sense.
We can’t love someone we don’t know or want to get to know (Personal Identification). We can’t love someone to whom we are not willing to commit (Commitment). And we can’t love someone for whom we are not willing to sacrifice (Sacrifice).
All three of these qualities are both necessary and sufficient. When just one of these elements is missing, the love of Christ is absent. But when all three of these qualities are present, they are sufficient for us to be able to say “the love of Christ is among us.”
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org
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