Inspire Generous Love
By Brian Grasso
Three consequences of when followers of Jesus love like Jesus.
Love generously. This is our new official slogan here at Simple Charity. Our team reached these two words after coming up with over thirty phrases and discussing their relative merits during multiple All Hands meetings.
Love, of course, is the central command of Christian ethics. Jesus Himself teaches us that the greatest commandment in Scripture is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. But before we get to Jesus’s commands to love in Scripture, we read that the Father named the Son as beloved in Matthew 3:17, and from that place of belovedness He lived out His earthly ministry. Likewise, the Son speaks the love of God over us. John 13:34 records Jesus saying, “Just as I loved you, you also are to love one another.” Clearly and crucially, His love initiates, not ours. John writes in his first epistle: “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19).
It is when we turn from our sin, put our trust in Jesus, and rest in our relationship with Him, when we really learn to receive his love, forgiveness, grace, friendship, and truth, that we are transformed into the kind of people who can extend His love to the world. This requires the humility of knowing that we are not saved because we are brave, strong, or smart. We are saved because of the mercy of Christ.
“Love” is, in my opinion, a strong contender for the most powerful word in the English language. In culture, whoever loves most radically and most credibly is going to have the greatest lasting influence. I’ve heard many sermons when pastors have lamented that we don’t know what the word “love” means anymore, but I don’t think that’s true. Yes, we use the word “love” haphazardly (“I love my dog,” “I love that show,” etc), but at the end of the day, we still know what the word means. We know its power.
John writes, “This is how we know what love is: Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” We know what love is because of the story of Jesus laying down His life for us. Dying to save another’s life is the greatest possible expression of love, and all Christians are recipients of that kind of love. In contrast to self-sacrifice is modern culture, which is shockingly selfish. We are conditioned to prioritize our own desires, preferences, and needs before others, and many in the modern world celebrate this selfishness as confidence, leadership, or authenticity when it’s actually antithetical to love.
At Simple Charity, we want to inspire generous love. We want people in our community to expand the circles of their love, to put out more chairs at the table, and to welcome new faces to the family. I believe that the growth of a community of Christ-followers oriented around loving generously will have three profound consequences:
The renewal of the Church
The flourishing of neighbors
The credibility of Christian witness
Let’s look at each of these.
The renewal of the Church
Church renewal happens when God’s people reject the idolatry and sins of their era and whole-heartedly surrender to the will of God. Jesus came to bring a heavenly Kingdom, not an earthly one. The nature of this Kingdom is a people whose hearts have been transformed by the Holy Spirit, whose community is marked by uncommon unity, and whose influence in culture is like a lamp in darkness. We’ve been told the signs to look for to determine if it’s the real thing: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). God’s spiritual Kingdom is characterized by these qualities.
We’ve also been told what not to look for: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, and drunkenness (Galatians 5:19-21). To the extent that the “acts of the flesh” described by Paul are inside the church—not just outside of it (which we should expect)—we are in need of renewal. That renewal will include many things, but one telltale sign will be selfish ambition being replaced by generous love. When the church is renewed, love becomes the animating force of the community. When love becomes the animating force of the church, the church is renewed.
The flourishing of neighbors
When God’s people throw down their idols and surrender fully to the God of love (1 John 4:7), they will care for their neighbors in practical ways. They will walk in the footsteps of Jesus who spent his life ministering in word, deed, and sign, and the implication will be sick people healed, homeless people sheltered, hungry people fed, vulnerable people empowered, and lonely people befriended.
Throughout history, times of church renewal have included radical generosity and service of neighbors. In his book Dominion, the historian Tom Holland showed how Christian theology created the historical context that led to the abolition of slavery, modern hospitals and universities, and a society that believes that everyone has basic, inalienable rights. When God’s people love generously, we put our time and money where our theology is. We become ambassadors of the grace and mercy of Christ to a dying world, and our gospel witness is compounded by our good deeds. When God’s people love generously, our neighbors flourish.
The credibility of Christian witness
A Barna study revealed that the primary reason that Americans with no faith doubt Christianity is the hypocrisy of the church. The same study showed that 22% of professing Christians doubt their faith for the same reason. The Christian story is only credible when it is transformative. Too often churches are operated as content generators, social clubs, or political blocs instead of fully surrendered communities of love. When we put anything ahead of seeking first the Kingdom of God in our hearts and lives, we go astray, and the credibility of our message suffers.
God is glorified when His people cast down their idols and surrender fully to Him. God is glorified when people made in His Image have what they need to flourish and thus reflect that glorious Image. And God is glorified when a watching world believes in Jesus because they can see with their eyes that His followers’ message is credible.
So, love generously. This is our new slogan. These two words encapsulate the long-term influence that I pray Simple Charity has. If by God’s grace we’re able to create communities that love generously on their college campuses, in their cities, and in the world, I believe the result will be the renewal of the Church, the flourishing of neighbors, and the credibility of Christian witness. We would be honored if you supported us in this mission.
