All you need is love! . . . bum ba bum ba ba . . . All you need is love! . . . bum ba bum ba ba . . . All you need is love, love! . . . Love is all you need!
Okay . . . I’m counting on at least the boomers having a song stuck in their heads about now. (Have no clue what I’m talking about? Check this out: The Beatles – All You Need Is Love (Official Music Video) – YouTube.)
Love is kind of a main theme of John’s first letter. But, contrary to what John (Lennon, not the apostle), Paul, George, and Ringo proclaimed, it isn’t all you need. Love, in and of itself, is not the answer. It matters what you love.
Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, . . .
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
(1John 10a, 15b ESV)
Do not love the world . . . that’s what I’m chewing on.
NOT as in forbidding being in wonder and awe of creation. NOT as in prohibiting love for people, fellow image-bearers of God. But don’t love, don’t embrace, don’t set your affections on that which is inconsistent, incompatible, and even in conflict with God. Do not love the world.
I look back on my early days and realize how much we had reduced “loving the world” to participation in certain activities. If you didn’t go to that place, if you didn’t listen to that music, if you didn’t engage in that thing, then you weren’t loving the world. Some truth and some profit in that line of thinking. But not enough truth and not enough profit, I think.
For the world John is speaking about goes deeper than just sinful activities. It’s about sinful attitudes.
For all that is in the world — the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life — is not from the Father but is from the world.
(1John 2:16 ESV)
Peterson summarizes it as “wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important.” Philips says the “whole world system” is based on “men’s desires, their greedy ambitions and the glamour of all that they think splendid.” And for Wuest, in his literal translation, it’s “the passionate desire of the flesh, and the passionate desire of the eyes, and the insolent and empty assurance which trusts in the things that serve the creature life.”
Not just about what we do, but about what we want. Not just about where we go, but about what we hope to get. Not just about exercising our freedom, but about being honest with our feelings.
It matters what we love. It matters why we love. And we can only love as we should as Christ loves through us.
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.
(Philippians 1:9-11 ESV)
That your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment . . .
Oh, in a world that increasingly loves darkness more than light; in a world that increasingly loves expressing self more than serving others; in a world that increasingly loves tribalism over tenderness, that loves being hostile; would the love of God abound more and more through the people of God as it comes through Jesus Christ.
Only by the abundant grace of God.
Only for the everlasting glory and praise of God.
