Advent: Love

 How do you know someone loves you?
How do you love others?

The first candle of Advent is Hope and the second is Love.  Love is a fitting Advent candle because God is love and Jesus is God.

Love is too often ambiguous.  Many of us can feel it better than explain it.  So to understand love we must look at its definition.  Jesus and His actions give us the definition of love.  

Jesus in all of His life has shown and is showing pure love.  But what is so loving about Christmas that we spend one of the four weeks of Advent dwelling upon it?  

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." 
-John 3:16

We don't often think of this verse as a Christmas verse, but it most certainly is.  The very first gift given at Christmas, before even those the magi gave, was Jesus Himself.  God so loved the world, that... Christmas.

So, we've established that God the Father is loving, but what about Jesus?  Let's look at another lesser used Christmas passage:

"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.  Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

but made Himself nothing,

taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

He humbled Himself

and became obedient to death...

even death on a cross!" 

-Philippians 2:3-8

Jesus, being God Himself and therefore equal to the Father, had to agree to this plan.  In fact, being God Himself, it was Jesus' plan.  At Christmas Jesus lowered Himself beyond our wildest imaginations.  The absolute value of His condescension is immeasurable.   From the apple of the eye of Heaven to the womb of a poor, teenaged girl to the cross!

True love must condescend. 

Advent is like a coin.  On one side we look back to the love that was shown; on the other side we look forward to the full experience of that love.  And today, we invest ourselves in living out what Advent teaches us.

When our hope is in Christ we can love like this.  When we're confident in how we are loved and abide in that love, then we can confidently, relentlessly and selflessly love like we're loved.  If we aren't confident in our hope we will have trouble condescending because we'll be afraid of losing more than we'll gain.

We are to love in this way because we know who love is.  We are to love like this because we are to mimic Jesus.  We are to love like this because the Holy Spirit grows us into mature, new creations of the perfect Creator.  As Sinclair B. Ferguson says in his book Maturity, "love... is Christian maturity in action."

We're also to love in the here and now because it pays dividends.  Notice the rest of Paul's poem about Christ in Philippians chapter 2:

"Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place

and gave Him the name that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

in Heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father."

- Philippians 2:9-11

Christ's awesome condescension rendered Him a reward.  Any condescending we do in love will also lead to reward.  Not the same reward as Christ, because our condescending is not worth comparing, but a reward nonetheless.

"'I tell you the truth,' Jesus replied, 'no one who has left home or brother or sisters or mothers or father or children or fields for me and the Gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields... and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.  But many who are first will be last, and the last first."
-Mark 10:29-31

True love, condescending love, is always worth it when done out of love for God and for neighbor.  At Advent we look back at our example of love and forward to our reward while living out ever-maturing lives of love.

"Stir one another up to love and good works" today.