Colossians 3:14 Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.
We’re looking at one verse this morning, Colossians 3:14. Above all the other godly virtues is love. Love is the crowning, supreme, godly virtue. Love binds them all together, like a belt. It is like your blood stream that feeds all the other organs of your body, or your ligaments that unite all the bones of your body so they don’t twist too much and become dislocated. 1 Timothy 1:5 says the goal of our instruction, all our preaching and teaching, is love out of a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
We use the world very carelessly. “I love whatever makes me feel good, important, happy, like pecan pie.” “I love how you love me.” “No one can tell me who to love. I’ll love whomever I choose.” “Love is a feeling I feel when I feel the way I feel with you.”
This is not to say that lost people don’t do acts of love for others. We deeply appreciate those men and women who put their lives on the line every day fighting evil. I read this week about two soldiers who made heroic sacrifices for their fellow soldiers. Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2010, Lance Carpenter threw himself on a hand grenade to shield a fellow Marine from the deadly blast. It cost him his jaw, right arm, right eye and most of his teeth. He was rewarded the Medal of Honor. In 2006 while fighting in Baghdad, Ross McGinnis saved the lives of four fellow soldiers when he threw himself on a hand grenade that was tossed into their military vehicle. He was killed instantly. These two soldiers certainly demonstrated loving acts of self-sacrifice. We thank God for every soldier and police officer who runs to danger to protect the rest of us.
But even as a Christian you may have a hard time figuring out what God’s kind of love looks like. You’ll be accused of being unloving when you take a strong stand for truth or call out a false teacher or confront someone about their sin. You are sometimes told you can’t love others until you learn to love yourself. Or you are told God loves everyone unconditionally. R.C. Sproul said he wants to scream whenever he hears this. Why? Because if God loves everyone unconditionally, no one has to worry about their sin or spending eternity in hell. A decade or two ago pop psychology told us that if we’re having trouble in our relationships it’s because we have these empty love tanks. Somebody else has failed to fill our love tanks. We’re victims of other people’s failures.
LOVE CAME DOWN
Let’s get a good handle on what biblical love does means and how we walk in it. God is love. No one questions that. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only, His unique Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life.”
1 John 4:9-1, By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Let’s personalize God’s love for sinners. Love came down at Nazareth and Bethlehem. Love grew up in Nazareth. Love walked the roads and village streets of ancient Palestine. Love was hated and rejected and crucified outside the city He loved. Jesus didn’t go to that cross angry and frustrated because people weren’t filling His empty love tank. Love poured out His life blood and suffered God’s wrath on that cross as the substitute for sinners, for people who were His enemies. And love conquered death, ascended up to the Father’s right hand, and sent forth His Spirit, that Spirit of love Who sheds abroad godly love into the hearts of every one of His people. Some of our greatest hymns extol God’s love: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
LOVE IS NOT OPTIONAL
In verse 14 Paul exhorts us, above all else, to put on love. Love is not optional. In fact, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 you may have the greatest oratorical skills to hold vast audiences spellbound and even talk to angels, but if you don’t have love, you are a clanging cymbal. When our granddaughter Erikka was a little girl she sometimes got all the pots and pans out of our cabinets and sat on the floor banging away with some wooden spoons – a royal cacophony of noise. You may be utterly brilliant with your theology, a regular walking systematic theology, but without this love, you are a big zero. You may even go to the martyr’s flames, but if you don’t have this love in your heart and in your life, again, it’s worthless.
We’ll come back to 1 Corinthians 13 at the close of this message. For now, I want to take you for a ride through the biblical terrain describing God’s kind of love.
LOVE GOD AND YOUR NEIGHBOR
Leviticus 19:18 says, “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.” Loving your neighbor as yourself didn’t start in the New Testament.
In Matthew 22:37-39 when a lawyer asked Christ to identify the greatest commandment, what did Christ say? “Love God with all you’ve got, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The entire revelation of God depends or flows out of these two commandments. Love vertically, God with all you’ve got. God is first. Then love horizontally, your neighbor as yourself. I want you to notice something here. Christ did not say, before you can really love your neighbor you’ve got to learn to love yourself. He said love your neighbor as you already love yourself! And let me assure us, we really love ourselves.
Romans 13:8-10 says the same thing and Paul summarizes in verse 10, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Love God and your neighbor and you’re pleasing God. These two are the essence of God’s will for His people.
LOVE’S MODEL AND STANDARD
Ephesians 5:1-2, Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; 2 and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
The lost person can’t imitate God. You have to be one of God’s beloved chosen children indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And even then since you are a finite being, you cannot imitate them to the extent God does. What does it mean to imitate God? You can’t imitate what are known as His incommunicable attributes. Those are attributes exclusive to God, like aseity, omnipresence, omniscient, and so on. However, you are to imitate His communicable attributes, those that humans can transmit to others like mercy, grace, and goodness. In this case we are talking about love. “Walk in love.” How do you do that? Look at Christ. He loved you and gave Himself up for you. Love is self-denying sacrificial giving to meet the needs of others. I think that’s the best simple definition of love. Love is the opposite of self-fulfillment, self-esteem, and self-focus. 2 Timothy 3:1 says in the later times men will be lovers of self. Don’t buy into the idea that you need self-esteem. What you need is Christ-like self-denying sacrificial giving to others.
RESPONSIBILITIES OF GOD’S KIND OF LOVE
Love your enemies – Matthew 5:44. God says you are to love your enemies, people who hate us. This proves love is not primarily a feeling. He’s not saying whomp up a good feeling about people who are persecuting you or spitting on you or getting ready to lop off your head. He says love them, do good to them, and pray for them. You don’t have to like your enemies, but you’ve got to love them.
Love one another – John 13:34-35. Jesus made it very clear, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Notice the standard? “As I have loved you.” Love is self-denying sacrificial giving to meet the real needs of others.
Love builds up others – 1 Corinthians 8:1. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. You can have a head crammed with all the finest points of doctrine, and be really proud about it. Love is humble and actually cares for and builds up other people.
Do everything in love – 1 Corinthians 16:14. God says let everything we do be done in love. Everything! We need prayer and daily time in God’s Word.
Faith loves and love serves others – Galatians 5:6, 13-14. Alexander Strauch in his book Leading With Love tells about a missionary who spent three hours during a dinner talking about himself, his successes, how hard he worked, how far he traveled, how blessed of God he was. Not once did he ask about the others sitting with him. This was not a love that serves others. This is called bragging and running at the mouth. Love doesn’t focus on me. Proverbs 27:2 says “Let another praise you, and not your own lips.” Sometimes the most loving thing to do is listen and ask questions.
Love speaks the truth – Ephesians 4:15-16. Love and truth always go together. Love runs on the rails of biblical truth, just like a passenger train makes progress by staying on the tracks. Love is not just feeling good, making s’mores on the fire, and singing kumbayah. Love others by speaking the truth. Love doesn’t flatter people in their false teaching or go along with it in order to get along. Look at Christ. His love was always directed by truth. Everything He did was loving. He even threw out the scoundrels in the temple with truth and love.
Love discerns – Philippians 1:9-10. Paul prays that our love may abound in true knowledge and all discernment. Love isn’t weak and compromising. Love discerns based on the knowledge from God’s Word. There are times when love rebukes. Love exposes evil and warns of false teaching and heresies out there on the internet. Paul loved Peter in Galatians 2 when he confronted Peter about compromising the gospel. Warning others is not lacking love. When the Southern Baptist Convention asked for a vote on Critical Race Theory as a “helpful analytical tool” (Resolution 9) I heard in the documentary, By What Standard, Tom Ascol saying repeatedly, “No. No.” He discerned the evil in the theory. Love takes a stand like Luther at the Diet of Worms when he said, “Here I stand.” That was the most loving thing he could do.
Let’s get a word from Peter and John and then bring this to a conclusion.
Love fervently – 1 Peter 1:22; 4:8. These verses tell us to love one another fervently. Fervent has the idea of stretching out your heart toward other believers. 1 Peter 4:8 says above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins. God’s kind of love isn’t legalistic, nitpicking or looking for people to nail when they say or do some little thing you might think isn’t godly. When Luther reviled Calvin, Calvin said, “Though he call me a devil a thousand times, yet I will love and honor him as a precious servant of Christ.”
Love in deed and truth – 1 John 3:16. We understand love by this, that Christ laid down His life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for others. Then John challenges us to not just love in word only, but in deed and in truth. If you know someone is in real need and you could help him but you don’t, don’t claim to have God’s love in you.
WE NEED A SAVIOR
Back to Colossians 3:14, “Above all else, put on love.” B. B. Warfield, a great theologian, said, “Self-sacrificing love is…the essence of the Christian life.” God made us to be godly lovers above all else. He gave you a mouth, hands, feet, ears, eyes, a mind and heart to love Him and others. The fact is, without Christ laying down His life for our sins, we’d never even begin to love God’s way. We are all naturally selfish, self-loving, and self-serving. But Christ changes all that as He saves His people. Praise God, this body of believers is demonstrating this self-denying, sacrificial, giving love. But we want to increase more and more. We want to glorify God, enjoy His goodness, be full of God’s kind of love, fervently, joyfully loving God and one another.
Let’s close by reading this literary masterpiece in 1 Corinthians 13 which describes what God’s love is really like in practice.
- Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous;
- Love does not brag and is not arrogant,
- Does not act unbecomingly;
- It does not seek its own, is not provoked,
- Does not take into account a wrong suffered,
- Does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
- Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
- Love never fails.
Now let’s go home and practice what we’ve read. Pray through it. Ask God to help you grow in self-denying, sacrificial giving and caring for other people in your life. Begin with your family, then your local church, and then others God brings into your life.