Love Like Jesus

In John 13:31-35, we encounter what might be the most challenging command Jesus ever gave: love one another as I have loved you. This isn’t the complex kind of difficult—it’s the important kind of difficult. A child can understand the words, but the oldest saint struggles to live them out. We’re invited to examine five characteristics of Jesus’s master model of love: it always begins with the other person, it coexists with uncompromised truth, it doesn’t demand fairness, it embraces the journey of relationship, and it blooms when things get bad. The radical paradigm shift here is that we don’t love from our own resources or willpower—we love as lovers only because God first calls us beloved. This passage challenges us to see that loving within the church can actually be harder than loving outsiders, especially when there’s hurt or disappointment. Yet this is precisely God’s favorite tool for our maturity. Our love for one another isn’t just personal growth—it’s a grand display to a watching world adrift on a sea of counterfeit loves. When we love each other well, we become the only truly biblical seeker-sensitive model of church. The question that confronts us is stark: if someone described Jesus to those who know us, would they say, ‘Oh, I know someone like that’?