The Power Of Loving Your Church

Ahhhhhhh, love! It's what seizes your innards and turns the butterflies in your stomach into vultures. At least from the emotional side of what we consider love to be. The bottom line is, ask 10 different people their definition of love and you will get 10 different answers.

I think the best thing to do is instead of looking at Hollywood for the definition of love in a romantic comedy is to go to the Word of the Creator of love. To the One who just does not have love, but is Love. (Hang on. We're going to get into some Greek words and some 'fancy book-lernin'.)

We often give the philos words a short sheet in our New Testament studies because agape is exalted as divine love, and philos is relegated to human love. There is plenty of truth to this; after all, Jesus’ sacrifice was an act of agape. We cannot effectively love people without agape.

But historically speaking, they crucified Jesus not because of who He loved, but because of who He liked. The religious leaders of His day might have put up with a mission by Jesus of agape love to tax collectors and sinners. Christ’s ministry was a mission of agape, but for Him, agape meant befriending sinners. Liking sinners could not be tolerated. The Pharisees did not accuse Jesus of loving sinners; they accused Him of befriending (philos) sinners.

For instance, when Jesus called Levi away from the tax collector’s table, some of the Pharisees may have been impressed. But for Jesus to attend the party at Levi’s house to celebrate the man’s new life with his old friends, was unacceptable.

If Jesus had preached the message of John the Baptist at the party, the Pharisees might have been impressed. But “eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners” isn’t preaching to them. Rather, Jesus shared fellowship with sinners. He must have even appeared to be enjoying the company of the people around Him. “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend (philos) of tax collectors and sinners!’” (Luke 7:34). To a Pharisee, this kind of thing is definitely not acceptable.

Jesus didn’t preach the message of John the Baptist. Instead, He lived out John’s baptism by identifying himself with sinners. He could not have ministered to them if He had not liked them.

To like someone, is to reflect to them that they are made in the image of God. To like someone, is to affirm in particular what it says in general in Genesis about all creation: “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). We stew over how to improve someone’s self-image; Jesus simply befriended people, and in so doing affirmed they were made in God’s image.

Most people have a hard time believing that God is with them if not a single human being who claims to know Jesus wants to spend time with them. The first step toward liking the people we serve is learning to like the church in which we serve.

If we start by trying to like individuals, we get caught up in who we like more and who we like less, and that eventually turns into whose friendship we crave and whose we despise. It isn’t hard to see where that could lead.

THE NEW TESTAMENT LOVE-WORD agape has been so sanitized and compromised that we now have a word for love that we like. Of all the words for love studied so far, agape is the one word for love we shouldn’t like. The other loves are different; we’re supposed to like them.

The Greeks had different words for love, as Americans try to lump the word into one category. The love word hesed is the beautiful love: steadfast love. The love word racham is the gentle love: compassion. The delicious word philos has a great sandwich named after it: the philly cheese steak. These are all good loves. We can burn out showing all of them. But in their proper place and with the proper balance, these loves are supremely, satisfyingly human. They are also wonderfully divine.

But agape is a pain in the neck. Agape is brutal love. Why else would the Greeks shun this word? Was it because they knew what it really meant?

Yes, of course, because they knew that agape is the love-word for absolute, unself-centered, brutal sacrifice. Its central meaning for the New Testament derives from Jesus’ death on the cross: “For God so loved (agapao) the world that He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).

This is about God sacrificing His Son. Steadfast love, compassion, and delight are all part of God’s love for us, and they are all part of the sacrifice. But the sacrifice itself is agape. Jesus liked the sinners He spent time with; steadfast love was His only way of thinking; compassion for Him was like breathing. But in his act of agape, his tone changed, and so did the tone of His disciples.

Peter, who adored Jesus’ steadfast love and compassion, and who could never get over the fact that Jesus liked being with fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes, completely rejected Jesus’ decision to act out agape.

Jesus followed the admonishment with a lesson for all of us: “Deny yourselves, pick up your cross, and follow Me.” He never said we had to like it. He didn’t like it when it became His turn to sacrifice. He hung out with people He liked. He had compassion for people He healed. He promised never to leave or forsake His disciples.

But when it came time for agape, He said: “Abba, Father, for You all things are possible; remove this cup from Me; yet, not what I want, but what You want” (Mark 14:36). “At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachchani?” which means, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?’” (Mark 15:34). That’s the correct expression for living out agape.

The New Testament writers adopted agape as the standard word for love. We think this means that agape must also have some softer meanings besides “sacrifice,” “death on a cross,” “giving away our possessions and giving our body to be burned.” But agape didn’t make the Cross, the Cross made agape. The Cross isn’t a subset of agape, agape is a subset of the Cross.

The fact that the writers chose agape as the primary, defining word for love in the New Testament, and thus for life in the Christian community, shows how radically the New Testament redefines love from the perspective of the Cross. It also shows how radically the New Testament defines our concepts of friendship. For Jesus tells his disciples: “This is My commandment, that you love (agape) one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (philos) (John 15:12–13).

If we have agape for the people we serve, being loyal to them, having compassion for them, and liking them are a cinch. Jesus mustered the latter three loves without difficulty. But when faced with showing agape, He sweated blood.

Agape is decision love. Agape is the decision to make sacrifice.

Sacrificial love fleshes itself out in innumerable ways in the work of ministry. But I am drawn to the sacrifice of Ezekiel for the people of Israel as a concrete definition of what it means for men and women to complete the sufferings of Jesus and thus bring him to people. The Lord told Ezekiel:

"And you, O mortal … lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it; you shall bear their punishment for the number of the days that you lie there. For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred ninety days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment; and so you shall bear the punishment of the house of Israel. When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah; forty days I assign you, one day for each year. You shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, and with your arm bared you shall prophesy against it. See, I am putting cords on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege." (Ezekiel 4:1–8)

God ordered Ezekiel to become a living parable of judgment. Christians should be living parables of love. But Ezekiel’s prophetic tie-down was an act of agape as surely as was Jesus’ and as surely as is ours needs to be. Beneath the judgment Ezekiel portrayed, his days roped to the ground were a type of Jesus’ day nailed to the cross. Ezekiel’s tie-down is a type of our years of commitment to the ministry in which we serve.

The fact is, many of us feel like Ezekiel. We feel tied by ropes to the church we love. We bond with it, but the bond feels broken. We have had compassion for it, but we feel burned out. We like it, but it has spurned our friendship so many times, we strain to rejoice in it. If we choose to love in spite of the pain, that’s agape.

For the Christian, the agape decision is the decision to stay put. To refuse to untie the ropes that tie us to the place that God binds us, determined to show hesed, racham, and philos in a personal sacrifice far beyond the normal boundaries of these loves.

So the next time, you talk about love in the church, between brothers and sisters in Christ, and especially God Himself, pair up that talk of love with the action of agape.