Abounding Love
“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
In the church at Philippi, there was a disagreement between two significant members, namely, Euodia and Syntyche (Phil. 4:2). Now this was disrupting church life and it had the potential of ripping apart the church’s fellowship. So, Paul prayed for the church, that their love for each other would abound more and more.
This is what fellowship should look like, loving one another. But love isn’t merely a feeling, it does involve affection, but it also requires action or an expression of that affection. Love is incomplete if the person doesn’t express it.
I remember in school we used to play a game when there was snow on the playground. The game involved two people, one person forms a snowball and throws it to the other person, the other person has to catch it without the snowball breaking. And so, starting off very close to each other you throw and the other catches and each time you catch you move further away. So the point of the game is, you see how far you can go without dropping or breaking the snowball. So, the game is to send and receive the snowball.
Now replace the snowball with affection. The person who has the snowball in their hand has this raw affection. But that affection is incomplete unless they act upon it, they must express their love for the other person, (throwing the snowball to the other person). Now, when I say expression, I don’t mean saying, ‘I love you’, that certainly is an expression, but as the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words” I think this is true. And love is sacrificial service. Take Jesus as the ultimate example of love, Jesus came to earth to reveal the Father. And Jesus ultimately shows us God’s love on the cross, love requires action, and that was the most loving act history will ever know. And as we receive that love, our response is to love him back; he threw the snowball to us first, and we attempt to throw it back to him.
And as a church the same is true, we love each other with all of the affection the Spirit has worked in us, and we express that in many ways completing that affection.
But love also requires knowledge and discernment, because expressing that affection must be done in the right manner. Here’s an illustration; ‘a mother loves her child so much, that she gives them ‘Haribo sweets’ for breakfast’. This doesn’t make much sense, does it? The affection for her child is there, but her action upon that affection is terrible, it lacks knowledge and discernment of what the child really needs, her act is not very loving.
To love somebody requires that we intimately know who that person is and what that person needs, and that’s how the church abounds in love for each other, love increases as they know one another. True love is an outward expression of affection, not an inward feeling.
So we must love each other with knowledge and we must discern their actual needs, Paul includes in his prayer “that their love may approve what is excellent”. Excellence is a moral term. There are expressions of love that are excellent and there are expressions of love that aren’t, for example, a friend of yours is continually falling into sin; a discerning and excellent love would be to lovingly, and caringly confront them with their sin, showing them where it could lead them, this is not easy to do, but true love requires that you want them to live a life pleasing to the Lord. So true love leads to godliness. And that’s Paul’s next point, love each other “so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ”. We are all in this journey of life and faith together, and when I stumble I hope that you would pick me up, and when you stumble, I hope that I’d pick you up. The Christian life isn’t easy, and we need to love each other in order to remain faithful to God, until the day our journey reaches its end, the day when we will be before the righteous Judge, and our righteous Saviour.
And as we journey together, it is the Spirit of Christ who works in us, filling us with love, which is the fruit of righteousness in verse 11. And the ultimate end to us loving one another, and the ultimate end to God working in us, is to the praise of the glory of God. That’s our ultimate purpose and end, for God in all his glory to be praised by us. I could spend much longer on verse 11, but I’ll end there.
May we with Paul, pray this prayer for our own churches and may God be glorified by our loving others today.
