The one another commands

Love One Another

A command of Christ for his church · John 13:34

Love one another is the first and greatest of the one another commands, given by Jesus to his disciples on the night before he died. It is not merely to feel warmly toward each other but to lay down our lives for each other, as he laid down his for us. Jesus called it the mark by which the whole world would know that we belong to him.

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.John 13:34 (KJV)

What this command means

When Jesus called this a new commandment, the newness was not in the word love, for the law had long said to love your neighbor. The newness was in the measure: as I have loved you. The love he asks is patterned on his own, a love that stoops to wash feet, that forgives betrayal, that gives itself to the point of the cross. It is love as action and sacrifice, not simply affection.

This love is aimed first at the family of God, the brothers and sisters we are joined to in Christ. It does not stop there, for Jesus taught us to love even our enemies. But it begins in the household of faith, where the world can see it plainly, a company of very different people bound together by a love they did not manufacture and cannot explain apart from him.

Why it matters for the church

Jesus made this love the badge of his people. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. Doctrine matters and truth matters, but the sign hung out for the watching world is love. A church without it may be busy and correct and still fail to show the one thing Jesus said would prove whose we are.

Every other one another command is a branch of this root. To forgive, to bear burdens, to be kind, to serve, to honor, to be patient, all of these are simply love wearing working clothes. Where love grows cold the whole body grows sick. Where love is real the church becomes what it was made to be, a foretaste of the kingdom in the middle of a divided world.

Love is also what will remain when everything else has passed away. Prophecy will fail, knowledge will vanish, and the gifts we prize will fall silent, but Paul says love never faileth. A church that pours itself into everything except love is building on what will not last. To grow in this one command is to grow in the very thing that endures into eternity, the life of the age to come already breaking in.

How we fail at it

We fail at love most often not by open cruelty but by quiet neglect. We love the idea of the church while avoiding the people in it. We love those who are easy and useful to us and withdraw from those who are difficult or draining. We keep score, nurse offenses, and let distance grow where Christ would have us draw near.

We also mistake sentiment for love. It is easy to say we love the brethren and hard to inconvenience ourselves for one of them. Love that costs nothing is not the love Jesus commanded. His love bled. When we measure ours against his, we find how far short we fall, and that honesty is where growth begins.

How Christ enables it

We cannot love like this on our own, and Jesus never asked us to try. The command comes with its own supply. We love, because he first loved us. His love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so that what we could never work up we receive as a gift and pass on.

Look at the cross and love becomes possible. There you see the exact love you are asked to give: undeserved, self-giving, unafraid of cost. The more deeply you know yourself loved by Christ, the more freely you can love the brother who has nothing to offer you. Love flows downhill from Calvary; our part is to stay under the flow and let it move through us to others.

This is why Jesus gave the command on the night he was betrayed, with the towel and basin still near and the cross a few hours away. He did not hand us an ideal to admire from a distance; he showed us love in the act of dying, and then said, love one another as I have loved you. The command and the example are one, and the same Spirit that raised him now works that love in us.

How to live it

Start with the person God has actually placed near you, not the church in the abstract. Learn their name, their burden, their joy. Move toward the one you would rather avoid. Speak well of the absent, forgive quickly, and refuse to let small offenses harden into walls.

Let your love be practical. Give your time to someone who cannot repay it. Sit with the lonely, welcome the newcomer, cover a need in secret. Ask each day for one concrete way to lay down a little of your life for a brother or sister. Do this and the world will see, in a company of ordinary people, the extraordinary love of Christ.

Begin small and begin now, for love that waits for grand occasions never arrives. Ask, before the gathering ends, whom the Lord has put on your heart, and do one costly thing for that person this week: a visit, a meal, an honest word, an hour of your time given away. Keep short accounts, refusing to let a grievance sit overnight. And guard the inner spring: stay close to the One whose love you are passing on, in the Word and in prayer, so that your loving does not run on empty willpower but on the love of Christ freshly received. Love grows by being spent, and the more you give it away in his name, the more you find you have to give.

Related commands: Forgive one another · Serve one another · Bear one another's burdens · All the one another commands