Does warm, active, Christian love elude you? Do you behave like the world at large?

Look at today's largest social issues and biggest news items. Do you see almost gleeful polarisation, name calling, and hard-line language? Outrage for the trivial and apathy for the rest?

Jesus saw it all happening: “Iniquity shall abound” and “the love of many will become cold,” He said in Matthew 24:12 when the disciples asked for signs of the end of the world.

You? In heaven?

Cold, blind, hard hearts, and futile, vain thinking - they're signs of sinful alienation from the very life of God.

Can you imagine heaven filled with hearts like this?

Neither can God...

“Please!” begged Paul the Apostle in Ephesians 4, “Behave like the citizens of heaven you're called to be... So I say this, and insist in the Lord, that you no longer live as the Gentiles do.” (verses 1, 17).

Don't the Gentiles want to love as well?

You want extreme, Christian love, right? Have you tried just loving harder? Hating less? Caring more?

Haven't billion of others tried down through the ages?

Here's Ephesians 3:16-19 with God's end of the agreement highlighted:

“I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he will grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, you will be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God.”

Many non-believers want love. They try their hardest to love. But few desire the God of love within them. Love comes from God because God is love, and extreme, complete love only comes from being filled with the fullness of God.

What must I do to love?

Once you have heard Jesus, and have been taught in Jesus, and believe the truth is in Jesus, Paul gives the next steps in Ephesians 4:22-24:

In reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit,
and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

Three steps to love.

The doing part is your cooperation with God. That is your decision to leave the old way of life.

This is the narrow way! The only way to know the love of Christ, and be filled with all the fullness of God.

Tell me more of this love

Love walks in all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, and great tolerance for one another (Eph 4:1)
Love brings unity of the faith and knowledge of God, growing a perfect person (Eph 4:13,15)
Love speaks the truth (Eph 4:25)
Love works honestly and earns to give (Eph 4:28)
Love is a minister of grace in all communication (Eph 4:29)
Love is kind, tender, and forgiving (Eph 4:32)
Love gives thanks, speaking and singing praises to God (Eph 5:4, 19)
Love redeems the time (Eph 5:16)
Love binds husbands and wives together (Eph 5:33)
Love binds children to parents, and parents to their children (Eph 6:1-4)
Love builds the sweetest work relationships (Eph 6:5-9)
Love loves the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity (Eph 6:24)

Amen.