John 13:34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.
Is this really a new commandment?
Matthew 22:36-40 English Standard Version
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
That was the great commandment under the law but we live by grace. How does that differ?
Jesus demonstrated love. He showed us what agapē love looks like. We can see that love in Matthew 22:38 is the word agapaō. While agapē means love feast, agapaō means to welcome, to entertain, to be fond of, to love dearly. The comparative between the two is not in how Jesus loved us perfectly, it is in how we love ourselves.
Self love can never be as perfect and God’s love, it has an element of sinful history which God does not possess. No matter how much we feel forgiven, no matter how much we are grateful for His sacrifice for us, the memories of our past lives remain.
The law holds on to judgment, grace does not. If we deem ourselves unworthy of God’s love we will discover it is much harder to demonstrate God’s love to others. Justification is a declarative judgment from God’s Holy Court that changes His view of us. How we view ourselves is another matter.
Perhaps agapaō love takes us back to the point where Jesus said to us that how we treat our fellow man is how we treat him, a demonstration of grace, not an act of obedience. When you fix a meal and share it with a neighbor, do you preface the act with “My God commanded me to do this.”? No, the act itself is the demonstration of grace.
Our motivation for acts cannot be obedience, it has to be the abiding love we have for the one who saved us, changed us, and continues to guide us.
For the love of God is not declarative, it is at the heart of who we are as children of the Father.