In Christian College we said that a person’s spirituality was proportionate to the size of the Bible they carried. We joked that they functioned like ballast, holding the super-spiritual down from prematurely floating off to heaven. Spiritual midgets carried pocket New Testaments. Spiritual giants carried a full-sized, four-pound Thompson Chain Reference Bible, King James Version, Large Print. Jesus warned us about this very thing, about making religious gestures and sending religious signals for others to see. Jesus was deeply suspicious of religious behavior, the way we do outward religious things in order “to be seen by others” (Matthew 6:1;2;5;16) and to have them think better of us as a result. There is a long-standing Biblical tradition of criticizing of this kind of showy religiosity.
The scholars talk about the Bible’s “prophetic critique of religion” (Amos 5. 21-24; Micah 6:6-8; Isaiah 58), and show how Jesus Himself stood firmly in its tradition by quoting its veritable motto – “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6) – in Matthew 9:13 when He was publicly challenged about His relative disinterest about the ritual niceties of the religious observation of His day. In fact, Jesus was openly critical of those who were given to outward displays of religiosity as an identifying “brand” without it corresponding to the inward reality of that person’s heart, one’s inner dispositions, devotion, and disciplines. Jesus called such people “whitewashed tombs,” people who look so holy and devout on the outside, but who inwardly are “full of dead men’s bones – hypocrisy and iniquity” (Matthew 23:27-28).
This gets complicated because our faith commitments are supposed to show. What’s going on inside of us spiritually is supposed to show outwardly, but not in word and speech but in deed and in truth (I John 3:18). This is why Jesus said we would be known by our fruit. Jesus said “every sound tree bears good fruit, but bad trees bear bad fruit” (Matthew 7:17), and then He gave other people the right to look at what we say and at how we behave as Christians, and to answer the question of the truthfulness of the Gospel based on what they see (John 13:35; 17:20-21). It’s not our desks littered with “Jesus junk,” or our speech peppered with pious platitudes, or our cars plastered with witness bumper stickers, or the signals we send that identify us with some cause, or the religious veneer we put on our public personas to show that we are Christians. It’s love.
Not “luv.” But “love.”
“Luv” is what the Roman Catholic Philosopher Peter Kreeft calls the shallow, sentimental, transitory, and contingent flush of emotion that ebbs and flows with passing days and changing moods. The love by which we are to be known as Christians is the love with which God in Christ have loved us. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (I John 4:9-10). To be a Christian is to be loved by God in Christ, and then it is to love like God in Christ.
Early in my journey of faith I had a teacher who suggested that anytime I came across the description of love in I Corinthians 13:4-8, that first I read it as a description of how God loves me in Jesus Christ –
“God’s love for me in Christ is patient and kind; God’s love for me in Christ is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. God’s love for me in Christ does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. God’s love for me in Christ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God’s love for me in Christ never ends.”
And then that teacher suggested that I immediately read the description of love in I Corinthians 13:4-8 a second time as a description of the kind of love that others need to see in me because I am a Christian –
“Because of God’s love for me in Christ, my love for you will be patient and kind. Because of God’s love for me in Christ, my love for you will not be jealous or boastful; it will not be arrogant or rude. Because of God’s love for me in Jeus Christ, my love for you will not insist on its own way; it will not be irritable or resentful; it will not rejoice at the wrong but will rejoice in the right. Because of God’s love for me in Christ, my love for you will bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, ensure all things. Because of God’s love for me in Christ, my love for you will never end.”
As we sang all the time back in the day – “They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Not our rhetoric. Not by our public posturing. Not by our religious gestures, signals, statement, or signs, but by love, a love that is patient and kind, neither jealous nor boastful, neither arrogant nor rude, neither selfish nor domineering, neither irritable nor resentful, that doesn’t rejoice at what’s wrong but rather rejoices in what’s right, that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and that has no end. They will know we are Christians when we love like this, because this is how God in Jesus Christ loves. This kind of love is the observable fruit that grows in the life of a person who knows that they are loved by God in Jesus Christ.
*SOUNDINGS 