Learning to Love What Christ Loves

Opening Reflection

The natural human heart is a remarkably selective instrument when it comes to love. It loves readily what is lovely, what is useful, what returns affection in kind, what resembles itself. It extends warmth toward people who are easy to be around and pulls back from those who are difficult, draining, or have caused harm. This is not unusual — it is simply what love looks like when it is still entirely self-generated. Jesus acknowledged as much when He pointed out that even tax collectors love those who love them back (Matthew 5:46). The transformation Christ produces does not merely improve this natural selectivity; it introduces a different kind of love altogether — one that does not originate in the person's own affections but flows from a source outside themselves. Learning to love what Christ loves is not the work of a single decision; it is one of the longest and most demanding evidences of genuine transformation, because it requires the heart to keep expanding into territory it would never have chosen on its own.

Taking a Devotional View

In John 13:34-35, Jesus gives His disciples what He calls a "new commandment" — but the newness is not in the instruction to love, since the law had always required that. The newness lies in the standard: "just as I have loved you." Christ's love for His disciples was not conditional on their being lovable. It was not withdrawn when they were slow to understand, quick to argue about status, or prone to fail at the worst possible moments. It extended even to the one sitting at the table who would betray Him before the night was over. This is the quality of love Jesus sets as the measure — not affection for the agreeable, but a self-giving, steadfast love for people who have done nothing to earn it. And He makes it the public mark of belonging to Him: "by this all people will know that you are my disciples." Not theological precision alone, not moral respectability, not religious activity — love of this particular and costly kind is what He names as the distinguishing evidence of a life genuinely shaped by His.

The source of this love is not the believer's own moral effort but the Spirit's work within them. Paul declares that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5) — the love believers are called to express outward is first poured into them from above. John makes the origin explicit: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19), and he draws the unavoidable implication: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar" (1 John 4:20). The proof of love for an unseen God is practically tested in love for the very visible, often difficult people around us. Paul prays specifically that believers' love would "abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment" (Philippians 1:9) — suggesting that learning to love what Christ loves is genuinely a growing process, not an instant achievement. Christ loved the poor, the outcast, the sinner, the enemy, and the overlooked. To be genuinely transformed by Him is to find the circle of one's love slowly, sometimes painfully, expanding to include the same.

Lord Jesus, thank You that You did not love me because I was lovable — that Your love reached me when I had done nothing to deserve it and extended to me even at the cost of Your own life. Forgive me for the smallness of my love, for the way I have rationed it to those who are easy and withheld it from those who are difficult. Pour Your love into me by Your Spirit until it overflows toward the people I find hardest to love. Expand my heart into the territory You have always occupied — toward the overlooked, the difficult, the undeserving. Let love be the thing people recognize in me as evidence that I belong to You. Teach me, day by day, to love what You love and whom You love. In Your name, amen.