Love
The Path of Holiness is a journey. It starts with the selfishness of sin and it ends with a new view of the world around you. As your faith has grown, you begin to understand that you were made for more than just selfish ambitions. Our lives were not just meant to rotate around our selfish needs and wants. We were made for more. We were made for love.
God does not need us. He is complete; Acts 17:24-25 reads, “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need.”(NLT) He created us out of his love. We were not created to fill some void in God’s life. We were created because he loves us.
Because He loves us, God longs for us to love him back. Again, this longing is not based upon filling a need in his life, but because he wants to have a relationship with us. So since he formed us in our mother’s womb, he has been crafting us and leading us to the day when we would choose to love him. So at the beginning, our act of faith to receive God’s forgiveness was the first step of our love for him beginning to grow. However, our love is based out of our selfish need for forgiveness. Even at the beginning, our love looks nothing like God’s love. He does not need our love, yet he offers his. His love is unselfish.
The Path of Holiness is to draw us closer to God; to help us understand His nature, His actions and His love. He is teaching us that to truly love is to learn how to love like him: unselfishly. So the whole work of the Path of Holiness is to get us to the place where our lives are motivated out of love and not out of selfishness. If we are to truly live a holy life, a life that is set apart, then we must always be aware of how God would respond and act in every situation. Only when we begin to respond out of a heart of love will we ever reach the end of the path. Only then will we be on our way to becoming more like God.
Jesus encountered a young man who was interested in growing closer to God. He asked Jesus the question, “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40, NLT) Jesus summed up that our greatest commandment is to learn to love like God loves. We need to learn to love Him first and best. Then we need to learn how to see others the way that he sees them.
Let’s go back to our Path to Holiness found in 2 Peter 1:5-7, “In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.” (NLT) The last step along the path is to add love for everyone to our brotherly affection. We learned that growing in brotherly affection is to move away from our selfish ambitions and begin to see others in a different light. We have to begin to ask ourselves the questions: “What are their needs?” and “How can I meet their needs?” We need to begin to look at the world through the lens of brotherly affection because it will lead us towards having a heart for them that is motivated by love. When we are motivated by love, we begin to see the world the way that God does. We begin to see how we can meet the needs of others.
If we are to complete the path of holiness, then we need to begin to add love to everything that we do. This is not ‘head in the clouds love’ or ‘puppy love’ or even romantic love. This is a concern for others that is motivated from deep within that would cause us to set aside our hopes, dreams and wants to meet their needs. It is learning to love others as God has loved us. It is learning to love others, not because it makes you feel good, fulfilled or meets any of your needs.
Many find this last step to be the most difficult. As we have learned, showing brotherly affection can be hard work, as it goes against most of our selfish nature. We tend to see our misfortune and our needs before we see the needs of others. As we learn to be others oriented, we may feel that we are truly loving them. However, truly loving someone has more to do with our motivations than it does our actions. Are you truly loving them as you love yourself? Is it as natural to think of their needs as it is your own? For many of us, this last step along the Path of Holiness is the hardest because this one demands our all. Remember, Jesus said that the first commandment was to love God with ALL. He said that we are to love God with all of our hearts, all of our souls, and all of our minds.
The Path of Holiness does not lead to a destination. It is a circular journey. Each time we cycle through it, we move to a higher understanding of who God is and how he wants us to see the world. Every time through the cycle, we grow deeper in our relationship and thus learn more about ourselves. We learn more about where we are in relationship to where God wants us to be. So when we arrive at the step of love, we now turn again to faith. Faith that there is more. Faith that we can move deeper in our relationship with God and closer to who He is and who he wants us to be. Faith to believe that we have not arrived and can still grow. So to that faith we add goodness, the goodness to be even better than we have been. The goodness to continue to grow and be more.
The Path of Holiness is a lifelong commitment to becoming holy and set apart. Though we know when we start that we will never arrive at the final destination, we continue on because we know that we want to become more like God. We want to love like him. We also know that the closer that we get to God, the more of Him there is to discover. God gets bigger as we get closer.
Make the commitment today to begin this incredible journey. It is long, but along the way you will discover God and who he created you to be. You will discover your place in this world and how you can make a difference each day. You can begin to invest your life into the lives of others. You can give yourself away. Jesus said that when we begin the process of giving ourselves away, that is when we truly find ourselves.
shawn michael follis 