Love RemainsSample

Week 4: Love Remains

Love

The apostle Paul wrote these words several years after meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus. Love, he said, is greater than both faith and hope. It’s the quality God poured into creation when he formed people and the world we live in. It’s the quality Christ modeled in a radical, inside-out sort of way. A way that says everyone — men, women, adult, child, rich, poor, Jew, Gentile, Hebrew, Greek, — is welcome to share in God’s grace through the sacrificial love of Jesus.

Love sums up what Jesus said is the greatest of all commands: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” 

Yes, love is patient and kind. It is full of grace and humility. It is not proud, rude, or self-seeking. It trusts and hopes and perseveres, but it also disrupts.

Yes. You read that right: love disrupts. 

It disrupted Paul on the road to Damascus and completely changed his life forever. It disrupted death when Christ rose from the grave. It disrupted the Sadducees when Jesus overturned the tables in the temple. It disrupted Peter when Jesus called Peter out for denying him, but then later forgave him. Love disrupted the whole order of creation when Christ was born in Bethlehem. It disrupts hierarchies and our human definitions of service and leadership, weakness, and greatness. 

Jesus’ love disrupts. God’s love disrupts. 

Disruption

It disrupts us in a way that asks us to wait when we’d rather move, and it disrupts in a way that calls us to move when we’d rather wait. God’s love disrupts us so it can grow and change us. It makes us more loving, more gracious, more empathetic. It stretches our capacity to hold God’s love so we can better love others. 

Indeed, disruptions are not usually pleasant. And often, disruption is the last thing we associate with love. But is it possible that God could use disruption for our good? To remove the things we think will save us but are destroying us?

Perhaps true transformation lies in the understanding that love remains, even in the disruption. Love is the force that pulls us through, more sanctified, to the other side. Love is the foundation that gives us the courage to stand.

Our world has enormously experienced disruption over the last few months. Everyone has felt the effects of this sudden change in one way or another. But amidst the disruption, amidst the fear and discomfort, what might God be whispering to you? How might He be pressing you to grow? What step of courage might He be asking you to make? Is He asking you to wait, or is He asking you to act? Is your definition of togetherness being stretched? How are you being called to courageous love?

Lean into these disruptions. Find out what God has for you here. 

Reflection

What might God be saying to you in the midst of current disruptions? How does the knowledge that his love remains, even in the midst of disruption, affect the way you respond?