How Are We to Love One Another?

The Commandment to Love One Another

So the question that we have to answer at some point is, how do we walk in truth? How do we walk in love? How do we love people? I mean, we understand that that's something that Christ tells his people to do, to love one another.

That's the new commandment he gives to you. We're to love one another. We're actually supposed to show love to other people as well. And I think love is something that it's going to be different in different contexts.

How you love somebody, we have to understand that how you love your wife, for example, is going to be different than how you love your neighbor, how you love your friend, how you love your constituents, how you love your workers, how you love your slaves, things like that.

How you love your masters. It's going to be different, but there's one standard for love, right? And it's not having kindly affections for someone, although it is inclusive of that. If you love someone, you should have affections for them to some degree.

What Love Is Not

Love is not using a soft, gentle tone of voice, something like this. That's not how you understand what love is. That isn't what love is. We have to define these things biblically. We have to define these things biblically.

Love is not even using a plethora of heart emojis. If you put on your Twitter handle, you put your name, and then you put a little heart next to it, that doesn't change anything about you. That doesn't make you more loving.

It doesn't make you less loving. It's completely meaningless. You can put heart emojis in all of your tweets, and it has nothing to do with whether that tweet was loving or not. You can use the word beloved all you want.

People do this all the time. Oh, beloved this, beloved that. I'm supposed to think that that somehow makes it loving. That's not the definition of loving. Look, there's nothing wrong with the word beloved.

There's nothing wrong with heart emojis as effeminate as they think they are. There's nothing really wrong with it. That's just a taste thing on my part. I use heart emojis too in ironic ways typically, but here's the thing.

None of that is a sign of how loving you are. How do we define love? That's the question. How do we define love? It's an extremely important question for every Christian. Here's what John says, this is 2 John.

Here's what it says. This is a small little book. I mean, look at this. It's tiny. You could read this probably 100 times in a day. Listen to how John defines love, ready? He says this to the elect lady and her children.

He says, I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in truth just as we were commanded by the Father. And now I ask you, dear lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another.

That's what I just said, that we love one another. And listen to how he defines love, ready? And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments. This is the commandment just as you have heard from the beginning so that you should walk in it.

Love Defined by Obedience to God's Commandments

How do we define love? How do we know if we're loving someone? It's not the feelings. Your feelings can manipulate you. Your feelings can betray you. Their emotional states can betray you. How do you know you're loving someone?

It's not what seems right to you. It's not what seems like the most loving thing to you. No, that's not how you know. How do you know you're loving people? If you're obeying the commandments of God. There's 10 of them.

There's 10 commandments. And we have applications of those commandments in many different ways that we see in the Old Testament and the New Testament. How do you know you're loving someone? Well, are you obeying the commandments?

That's how you know. You can use all the heart emojis you want. It doesn't make a difference if you're slandering and lying about someone. If you're saying something is true about someone that is obviously not true about someone.

It doesn't matter how many heart emojis you use. It doesn't matter how many blog posts you write in a winsome tone of voice. It doesn't matter. Any of those things don't matter. What matters is, are you obeying the commandments?

And so if you're a king, for example, you're a judge, you're on a jury or something like that, and someone gets convicted of raping somebody else, right? Do you know how you know you're loving someone?

Is if on the evidence of two more witnesses, that person's convicted, and then they are given a swift death penalty for raping someone. That's how you know you're loving people. When you're obeying the commandments of God.

Kindness, Gentleness, and True Love

Okay? So let's not pretend like, well, if he has a couple of heart emojis, well, that's how I know. No, that's not it. That's not it. It's not about the tone of voice. You know? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, beloved.

This beloved. That's not how it is. Look. Affections are great. There's nothing wrong with having affections. There's nothing wrong with being kind and gentle. In fact, these are very good things. But how do we know what love is?

Is it who seems kinder? Is that how we know what love is? Is it who is the most gentle person? Is that how we know what love is? Look, your emotions on who's the most kind and gentle can deceive you. It's very easy to be deceived by emotions by thinking someone is saying smooth, buttery sounding things, gentle things.

But really, they're just war in their hearts. It's vicious. I see this all the time with people on Twitter. They've got kindly ways of saying the most vicious things you could possibly imagine. The worst slanders, the most evil lies.

They have nice, kindly ways to overturn the law of God, and by definition, that is hate. If you're not following the commandments of God in every area of your life where you have authority, then you hate your brother.

You don't love them, no matter how many heart emojis you use. And so, listen, when we're talking about love, we better be talking about the commandments of God because that's how we know what love is.