Musing 24

“And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” – Matthew 24:12 (ESV)

I don’t think there’s a single sentence that better encapsulates our age than this sentence. To be clear, sin is a burden on the heart, especially for those who love righteousness.

But how do we guard our hearts against the love of many growing cold?

I submit that it is recognizing that we ourselves were loved by God while we were still at enmity with Him. When we remember that God loved us while we were rebels, we can recognize that Jesus embodied what it means to love His enemies. To those who desired repentance and salvation, He was gentle, lowly, comforting. To those who had no intention of repenting and bowing the knee, He called them out and warned people against them.

God calls us to leave vengeance to Him, and instead our responsibility is to repay good for evil, to heap burning coals on the heads of our enemies through our kindness, and to trust that God brings justice.

I am deeply disturbed at how often Christians seem gleeful at petty behavior. Particularly in recent years, it is more and more common to find Christians who do not give friendly ribs and jokes with their friends of different political persuasions, but are outright vicious, about “owning the libs”. How much stronger a witness could we be if instead of allowing ourselves to define a person’s value by their political perspectives, but instead saw them as fallen humans whose primary need was to be reconciled to God?

Practically though, how do we witness to a people who are increasingly hostile to the truth?

First, to take the log out of our own eyes, I often recommend reading Charity and its Fruits by Jonathan Edwards. It is a very practical and holistic look at what Christian love entails. And because Edwards is comprehensive in his application, it is very convicting. Pretty much everything Edwards wrote in that book is still applicable today, simply because human nature hasn’t changed.

Second, we need to increase our understanding of the sinfulness of sin and how serious sin really is. At least in the modern context, I think a big reason why we have let the love of many grow cold is that even in Christian denomination that have historically emphasized the seriousness of sin, we capitulated on the seriousness of sin, and so we end up minimizing how deep the enmity we had towards God as unbelievers. As Jesus said, “he who was forgiven little, loves little”. When we in our day-to-day lives don’t appreciate the depth of our depravity, we think ourselves as having been forgiven little, not realizing the true depth of the forgiveness we have received. But if we meditate on the depth of sinfulness in our hearts, we can in turn use that to magnify the grace we have received, and in so doing increase our love.

Third, we can seek to be more prayerful in people’s lives. It is hard to hate those we are actively praying for. When we bare our souls in the sacred space of prayer, we are reoriented away from the world’s categories and battles and instead refocus on Jesus and His will in this world. And we find that as we bear other up in that space, our souls attitude towards them changes. No longer do we seek to be hardened in our hatred of them, but we are softened as we seek their ultimate good.

To phrase the third point another way - we learn to love in prayer because we are going to the God who is love. As we grow in our love of God, we should also grow in our love for others, especially our brothers and sisters in Christ.