Empowered for Love

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. –John 13:34-35

In my previous posts I suggested B.R.E.A.T.H. as a trauma-informed discipleship and church planting framework. The next movement in the discipleship journey is the turn outward.

Empower: cultivating habits that empower love of neighbor, including works of justice and mercy.

Empowerment involves loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. This is the second half of Jesus’s great commandment (Mark 12:30-31). Exhaling God’s love is the focus of the remaining four movements.

Returning to the idea that we are created to love, this part of the journey involves relationships with others. When humanity experienced that original trauma, one of the major breaks was not just in our relationship with God, but our relationship with each other.

We are hiding in the garden, “naked and afraid” not just separated from God but from each other (Genesis 3). In Christ, we are reconciled in all those fragmented relationships, and commissioned to be instruments of reconciliation for others (2 Corinthians 5:18). We can be in the kind of relationships with one another that God intended from the beginning.

Most of us are limping from wounds in this department. Chances are high that at some point in your life someone you loved, someone you opened yourself to in a vulnerable way, disappointed or even harmed you. Sometimes this wounding comes from the very familial figures who were supposed to protect us from that kind of harm. Those wounds can become a source of shame and pain that many may carry our entire lives. They can diminish our capacity to love ourselves and others.

Holding onto resentments can be likened to “drinking poison and expecting the other party to die.” Resentment doesn’t hurt them it only hurts us. Resentment is a kind of mechanism to “re-feel” something. It imprisons us in a memory of harm. We maintain a negative sentiment, reliving and nurturing it again and again over time. When we are trapped in our own agony of isolation, fear, and resentment, we act out from our brokenness and bring harm to others.

Yet “in Christ” there is healing from those wounds. The key to this healing is forgiveness. Forgiveness is not forgetting. It’s not excusing the harm done to you. It’s a spiritual process through which we can let go of our anger, sadness, disappointment, and frustration. Forgiveness is the only pathway to peace.

This is an essential aspect of Jesus’s teaching, in fact, it’s located right in the center of the Lord’s prayer, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Jesus goes on to interpret what he means by this, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).

 In recovery fellowships we have a practical way to live out Jesus’s instructions. If we realize we are carrying a resentment against someone, we pray for that person (literally as Jesus tells us to “pray for our enemies”, Matthew 5:44). We pray for them every day for a minimum of two weeks (sometimes longer). We pray for God to bless them, to pour out provision and healing for them, to give them health, happiness, and prosperity. We pray every day until we mean it. Whether or not that person changes, the prayer process always changes us.

It’s possible that in our woundedness we hurt other people. If we are carrying guilt about harm we have caused, this phase of our discipleship involves going back to make amends. We can’t just say, “Hey, I’m a Christian, sorry to everyone I ever hurt out there, but I’m all better now!” We must go and make things right with those we have hurt.

 Jesus tells a story about this. He says, “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24).

To me, this communicates that restored relationships with our fellow human siblings are more important than religious rituals and offering sacrifices. Wouldn’t it be great if simply making an offering could heal wounds between people? However, it does not. We must actually go and offer the necessary actions and words that heal the wounds of those we’ve harmed.

Trying to skip this aspect of our discipleship leads to a sad parody of knowing and following Jesus. We end up living a diminished life, not the life that is abundant. To use Jesus’s own words, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). For some “the thief” is an institutional iteration of the church that ignores the profound emphasis that Jesus places on relationships.

There is no freedom in the world like knowing we have done our best to repair the damage we have caused. The ability to live without looking over our shoulders. A soul in which the God-given alarm system of guilt has been silenced.

From the outside, this might seem legalistic or confining. In reality, it makes us freer than we could ever imagine.

Perhaps the hardest part of Jesus’s teaching comes here, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34-35 NIV). Whoa, Jesus! That is setting the bar really high! The community of disciples is to love one another the way Jesus loves us. And to go further, it’s through this love the world knows “you are my disciples” (John 13:35).

In the community of disciples, how we love one another is the witness to the world that we are the body of Christ. But it’s not just our relationships with those in the church through which we must embody this love. We need to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” in this “love thy neighbor” command. The answer is every single human being we will ever meet is our neighbor.

This posture was one that got Jesus in a lot of trouble. He was always pushing the boundaries of who our neighbor was. The religious leaders had a tightly defined ethnoreligious concept of who is the neighbor. Your neighbor is your fellow Israelite.

But Jesus came healing gentiles, commending the faith of Centurions (the symbol of Roman oppression over a subjugated people), eating with tax collectors, siding with condemned adulterers, and telling crazy stories about “good Samaritans” (the bitter hated racial and religious enemy of many Jews in the ancient world). Jesus expands the concept of neighbor back to the original intent of God blessing all the tribes of the earth through Abraham (Genesis 12:3) and the prophetic glimpses of a messiah through whom all people would be brought into a peaceable kingdom (Isaiah 2), and a day when all the gentiles would stream to the light of YHWH through Israel (Isaiah 60:3).

This is where Micah 6:8 has a relevant word for us, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” My friend Stephanie Moore-Hand and I have a new book coming out offering a practical framework for this.

Doing justice also includes giving of ourselves in sacrificial ways for the sake of others. It includes costly action on our part, to become “repairers of the breach” who speak and act to bring healing in the midst of oppression (Isaiah 58:12).

It includes us doing what Jesus calls of us in Matthew 25:31-46, to feed the hungry, provide drink for the thirsty, inviting and sheltering strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison. In fact, in doing these things for others, we are doing them for the Jesus who indwells them.

It could be easy to throw up our hands here and say, “Okay I’m out, I’m disqualified, I can’t possibly live up to this.” But this is exactly why this move in the discipleship journey is called “empower.” We actually can’t do this in our own strength, it requires supernatural intervention from the Holy Spirit.

We don’t want to slip into a form of legalism here where we convince ourselves that we are defined as Christians by our own actions. It’s not about our effort, it’s about grace.

In B.R.E.A.T.H. I suggest some small holy habits we can develop here that lead to big-time changes living one day at a time.