Nowhere in Scripture is conversion and salvation described as a simple one-time prayer. Instead, the Christian life is described as one of discipline, suffering, and perseverance in doing good. The essence of the Christian lifestyle is condensed in the Greatest Commandment (Matt. 22:37-39), respectively, in which Jesus exhorts would-be believers to love God with everything and to love their neighbors as themselves. Salvation is thus not a punch-your-ticket license for immorality or a freedom to sin, but is in fact a new ethic to the highest love and a freedom from sin.
The major thrust of the Christian life can be summed up by a single but immense word: love. This love has two important and related expressions. The first is the love of God. God is to be supreme, the very center in our lives. Anyone who has been in love knows that it is a constant and burning obsession that flames from the deepest parts of our beings. This is the kind of love that God asks of us.
The second part, the love for others, arises out of our love for God. It is our overwhelming love for the Almighty that empowers us and impassions us to love others. In a sense, this is a phenomenal transference of God's love and compassion to us so that His love passes through us. Becoming the "hands and feet" of Christ is not merely a nice Christian slogan or tagline, it is a commandment. Believers are to be the agents of God's love on the earth, the one's who physically act out God's compassion.
In fact, it is the fervor of our love that determines the validity of our faith. As John writes, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us (1 John 4:11-12)." John goes on, "for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20)." John concludes, "everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of Him (1 John 5:1)."
Clearly, our vertical relationship with God is intimately intertwined with our horizontal relationships with one another. For John, if we do not love one another we do not love God. This love refers to much more than a happy platitude or a quick "how are you doing?" Moreover, loving one another is about loving those who we would rather choose not to love. If we only loved those who love us back, we ARE NOT loving one another as God asks (Matt. 5:46-48). This is what doing the Word is all about (James 1:25; 2:8, 14-17).
If we do not love others, the love of God is not in us as it is meant to be. God does not desire intellectual ascension or one-time-for-all conversions. He wants us to love as He has loved us. He wants us to pursue Him by loving others as He would. There is a tremendous charge in the commandments of God, but they are completed through love. When we truly love God, when we are madly in love with God, we will desire to love those whom He loves. Let us then pursue Him with a fervent love that loves those whom He loves with the sacrificial love that He loved us with!
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