9.2 Reciprocal Love

God is Love. Love is reciprocal and practical. Love is costly; Love is daily; Love suffers long. Love never fails. We require a definition of God-Love first before enlarging on its operation among us as believers in Jesus.

We have seen that Grace is Life shared together. In the same way, Love is Hheart shared together. Yet God alone is Love. Just as God reserved power to Himself, so He reserved Love to Himself. No human loves apart from God, and when we Love God, we are simply giving to Him in return that Love with which He first Loves us. We humans do not generate Love; we reciprocate Love. Yet reciprocal giving is Grace. Love is found inside of Grace.

Loving God. For Love to abound, Grace must abound first. Love is the Father coming through. Grace is the Spirit as the essence through whom Love expresses Himself, but the Door, the passage, the womb, of God into our world, is Faith, the Lord Jesus living as us, the Faith of the Son of God.

The problem with Love as the Father, that is, God as the only source of Love, is that God is invisible, that is, undetectable by any created means of observation. This is why John is so firm on insisting that we love God only in loving one another. We see God, then, only in that passage of reciprocal love, flowing back and forth between us as we know one another in the purity of Christ.

What Is Love? If we want to know God, then we want to know one another. And the basis of knowing one another is Love. What is love?

Love is kindly affection and personal regard. Love is the deepest respect for the integrity of another’s person. Actually, we should place personal regard for another as the central or beginning meaning of reciprocal love. Then, out from personal regard comes kindly affection on the one hand and the deepest respect on the other hand.

Yet Love is always filled with purpose. God wants to be known, therefore He causes us to want to know Him. But God must be known inside His dwelling place, thus God causes us to want to know God by knowing one another. Our Love for one another comes out from this Purpose.

Personal Regard. Recognizing another as a personal person inside, just like one’s self, is the beginning of love. That’s why Jesus said, “Love your neighbor just as you love yourself.” Recognizing the personal in another then becomes valuing that which is personal to the other. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Carry one another’s great weight of value.”

The word regard means “respect, esteem, favor, the kindly feeling which springs from a consideration of the estimable qualities found inside another” (from etymonline.com). Regard is a small word, not a big word. It is a word of friendship, of walking together, of sitting together in quiet conversation, enjoying one another’s presence and person. It is the honor we hold for one another’s heart shared with God.

Kindly Affection. Kindly affection, then, speaks of the ongoing actions of Love. It means a gentle touch, a kind word, a cup of cold water on a hot day, being a shoulder to lean on. But again, kindly affection does not speak of big things, but of little things. The reason is that love speaks of the value of the other person, not the “greatness” of the one loving.

Kind originally means nature or family. Kindness then means that which naturally proceeds from being a family together. Kindly affection also carries the sense of bringing an increase. By kindly affection, I do those things that enlarge your life, that make your way easier, that bring you joy. But first I must know what is important to you. First we must be friends inside of personal regard.

The Deepest Respect. The deepest respect is the place where love does become very large. It is the honor I give to your person. The word “respect,” from the Latin, is literally, to see or look again. It means that I see and value you, I see and value myself, but then I see you again, and place you as “better” than myself. Respect contains NO disrespect of self, no “putting one’s self down.” It just means placing the greater value on the other.

The respect of Love means that I truly believe that you deserve the better place, that your opinion is of the greater value, that your person must have the greater protection. The very thought that you would be dishonored in any way is more than I could bear, and I give myself to Father that you would always be the honored one.

The Form of Love. Now we want to place loving one another into the form of Love, that is, Community. What is the form of Community?

One view of the form of Community is commitment inside of liberty and liberty inside of commitment. We say it both ways, for “one another” is the full reciprocity of equals in heart. On one hand, liberty is the form filled with the energia of commitment, and on the other hand, commitment is the form filled with the energeia of liberty. Here’s how Paul said it, in Romans 13. – Owe no one anything (liberty) except to love one another (commitment). Knowing God and one another – in the purity of Christ – means – in this perfect balance of liberty and commitment.

The Form of Grace. The other view of the form of Community is Grace. Grace is life shared together with God, but I know God inside of knowing you. Therefore Grace is life shared together with you. Life shared together means daily participation.

Jesus gave us the only definition of age-unfolding Life in the Bible, John 17:3, but David gave us its only description. Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! …For there the Lord commanded the blessing—Life forevermore (Psalm 133). We eat together, we work together, we make life decisions together, we worship God together, for inside of this daily togetherness is the Father made known – Life forevermore.

Recognizing the Father. Consider this absolute reality. – For the Love of God has been shed abroad in your heart through the Devoted Spirit given to you (Romans 5:5).

When I see you, I KNOW that you love me more than life itself. I am deeply humbled by your deep regard for me. And when you see me, you KNOW that I love you more than life itself. You are deeply humbled by my deep regard for you. – Because we KNOW that God is telling us the Truth.

We regard one another as the Father Himself coming through Christ Jesus living as each one of us. And the Spirit of Devotion is the living environment of Grace in which we recognize the Father from each other to each other as reciprocal God-Love.

Set-Forth Soul. How do we know Love? By this we know love – in that Jesus set forth His soul for us, for our sakes. By this we know love – and we also are committed to setting forth our souls for the sake of our brothers and sisters.

I “set forth my soul” for you in this way. I join you with the Father inside the thoughts of my heart and I set you and the Father completely free of me. This is the costliness of liberty, the price paid by Jesus to win our hearts, that we might win one another’s hearts. I do this all the time, more and more, especially when it hurts, and more and more I know that I am just like the Lord Jesus, my Life and my Salvation.

The Purpose of Love. Love, by definition, is motivated entirely by purpose. Since God alone is Love, His Purpose alone directs Love in action. God’s purpose is to show Himself to all as the All-Sustaining, All-Carrying One, the God who places Himself beneath, who gives Himself away to lift others up into Joy. As John said in 1 John 3:16, God Love revealed through us is the same as God Love revealed through Jesus – by this we know Love.

Here is what God Love says to each of us, His Purpose. “Bring your brothers and sisters with you, all whom I have brought into your life, just as Jesus did, and I will raise you up, just as I raised up Christ out from death with you inside of Him.” – Receive one another JUST AS Jesus receives you.

Upon God. Jesus did nothing outward to join us with the Father. He compelled or persuaded no one. What He did, He did entirely within the agony of His human soul. And in His agony of soul, Jesus gave Himself to the Father – “Father, You answer Me, You are with Me.” But NOT by Himself, rather, “I AND the children whom You have given Me.” Jesus placed Himself WITH us utterly into and upon God, KNOWING that God would raise Him up with us as well. That action alone caused All-Salvation.

Then He says to us, “As I am, so also are you in this present age” (1 John 4). – Love one another in exactly the same way that I love you. “Out from death” means that we carry ALL our brethren with us inside our hearts, through FAITH, into God.

How Much? Yet this is reciprocal Love. Just as I carry you inside my heart through faith into God, so you carry me inside your heart through faith into God.

Now, if I cast myself upon God, surrendering to Him my very life for your sake, and if you do the same for me, with what regard, with what compassion, with what high respect would we then also honor and care for one another? How much would we rejoice in knowing one another’s hearts and in sharing one another’s lives? How intimate would be our fellowship? How committed would we each be to one another’s well-being?

Indeed, loving God and loving one another are the same thing.

What Fills Love? The Completion of God includes our knowing one another inside the deepest levels of Love as we have just described. Our knowing one another is then the channel through which God-Salvation enters creation. Creation knows and loves God because the Church, as Communities of Christ among the peoples, knows and loves God and one another. What is known by creation is known among the daily gathering of believers in Jesus first.

Yet in all this wonder, we have described the form of Love. What is the Grace that fills this form? What is the synergeoing of Life that gives Life to all things, the very presence of God?

What FILLS this form of Love is our fellowship together, the deepest pleasure we know..