The Amazing Teaching of Christ’s Apostles on Love

“The greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).

What “Jesus began to do and to teach” He continued after His ascension into heaven by the Holy Spirit through His apostles (Acts 1:1).
What the apostles Paul, John, Peter, and James write about love expands on what Jesus had taught. And what they teach is every bit as amazing as Jesus’ teaching. This chapter is meant to be only a brief overview of the apostles’ principle teachings on love.
I assure you that you will find the study of the doctrine of Christian love to be personally life-changing, as countless others have. Dwight L. Moody, the Billy Graham of the 19th century, tells the moving story of his own life-transforming encounter with the doctrine of love.
A young British evangelist named Henry Moorhouse preached at Moody’s church for nearly a week. To everyone’s surprise, Moorhouse preached seven straight messages on John 3:16. Moorhouse covered the Bible from Genesis to Revelation demonstrating “the drawing power of the love of God.” Moody confessed he couldn’t hold back the tears as Moorhouse preach on the love of God in sending His only begotten Son for undeserving, rebellious sinners. Moody wrote that Moorhouse’s sermons were life-changing messages:

For six nights he had preached on this one text. The seventh night came, and he went into the pulpit. Every eye was upon him. He said, ‘Beloved friends, I have been hunting all day for a new text, but I cannot find anything so good as the old one; so we will go back to the third chapter of John and the sixteenth verse,’ and he preached the seventh sermon from those wonderful words, ‘God so loved the world.’ I remember the end of that sermon: ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘for a whole week I have been trying to tell you how much God loves you, but I cannot do it with this poor stammering tongue. If I could borrow Jacob’s ladder and climb up into heaven and ask Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Almighty, to tell me how much love the Father has for the world, all he could say would be: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”’[i]

Moody also confessed,

I never knew up to that time that God loved us so much. This heart of mine began to thaw out; I could not keep back the tears. It was like news from a far country: I just drank it in. So did the crowded congregation. I tell you there is one thing that draws above everything else in the world, and that is love. [ii]

As a result of Moorhouse’s influence, Moody began to study the doctrine of love. This further changed his life and preaching. He recorded the following testimony:

I took up that word ‘Love,’ and I do not know how many weeks I spent in studying the passages in which it occurs, till at last I could not help loving people! I had been feeding on Love so long that I was anxious to do everybody good I came in contact with. I got full of it. It ran out my fingers. You take up the subject of love in the Bible! You will get so full of it that all you have got to do is to open your lips, and a flood of the Love of God flows out upon the meeting. There is no use trying to do church work without love. A doctor, a lawyer, may do good work without love, but God’s work cannot be done without love.[iii]

May you also have the same life-changing experience as you study this thrilling topic of love. May Christlike love flow out of your mouth, hands, and feet to all those around you.
Now for a quick overview of the apostles’ teaching on love.

God Is Love.
“God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Our God is not Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” or some impersonal force of nature, or a man made idol of wood. The God of the Bible is a personal being who can speak, hear, choose, feel, love, and have a reciprocal relationship with other personal beings. The fact is there would be no love if a personal God did not exist and if He did not love. And God loves because “God is love.”

God Demonstrated His Love in Christ.
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). “He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The apostles constantly marvel at the incredible depths and extent of God’s love for His people: He “demonstrated His love” by giving His only begotten Son to die as an atoning sacrifice on a criminal’s cross for undeserving sinners. This is love, and no greater display of love is conceivable or possible. (see Appendix 1: The Gospel of God’s Amazing Love)

Knowing God’s Love in Christ
Paul prays that God would enable all believers to grasp the vast, incomprehensible nature of Christ’s love: “that you…may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:17-19). We are to know Christ’s love intellectually, personally, and experientially, although it “surpasses knowledge.”
Knowing Christ’s love provides the child of God the greatest assurance and comfort in the face of disappointment, bodily suffering, persecution, and death. Paul assures us that absolutely nothing in this entire universe can “separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 37-39).

The Holy Spirit Pours Out God’s Love.
The first-fruit the Holy Spirit is “love” (Gal. 5:22). God’s love has been abundantly “poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5). There is no Christian love without the Holy Spirit.

Loving God
The apostles refer to believers as people “who love God” and “who love our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 8:28; Eph. 6:24). To not love the Lord Jesus Christ means that a person is not a Christian (1 Cor. 16:22). The response of every true believer to Christ’s substitutionary death is love. Two principle ways in which we express love for God is by simple obedience to Him (1 John 5:3) and loving His people (1 John 4:21).

Love One Another
Peter, John, Paul, and James all speak with one united voice in their many appeals to love one another. They are all preachers and practitioners of the “new commandment.”
Peter writes, “Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another” (1 Peter 4:8). The little phrase “above all…indicates the supreme importance of love as the controlling factor in all relationships in the church.”[iv]
A major theme of John’s letters is love for one another. John even makes the practice of loving one another a criterion for testing whether one is a genuine believer.[v]
Paul calls love a debt we owe that can never be fully repaid: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another” (Rom. 13:8; NIV). “Love is a permanent obligation,” writes Leon Morris, “a debt impossible to discharge.”[vi] Doug Moo also captures the thought of this remarkable text: “We will never be in a position to claim that we have ‘loved enough.”[vii]

Love as Brothers and Sisters.
Christians are also to love one another with a special brotherly and sisterly love. This kind of love is a tender, intimate, unbreakable “family love.” Paul writes, “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love” (Rom. 12:10). Peter writes “love the brotherhood” (1 Pet. 2:17). As to the importance of brotherly love in the church, James Moffatt remarks that “no church has any prospect of stability or chance of existence in the sight of God if it neglects brotherly love.”[viii]

Love in Marriage and the Home
Paul charges Christian husbands to take the initiative to love their wives “just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). The standard of love God sets for Christian husbands is Christ’s total self-giving love. Christian wives also are commanded to love their husbands (Titus 2:4). Christian marriage and the home should be supremely marked by Christ’s love.

Love All People.
Christians are called to love all people, not just Christians. This is Paul’s pray: “And may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all people” (1 Thess. 3:12).[ix] Christian people are to be loving people like their Lord.

Pursue Love.
“Pursue love” is Paul’s charge to the independent-minded, selfish Corinthian believers (1 Cor. 14:1). And to Timothy, a church leader, he also says “pursue…love” (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22). We are to actively and continuously “pursue love” because we naturally pursue our own selfish interests and comforts over others.

Do Everything in Love.
“Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:14). Love is to be the all-encompassing characteristic of all that we do, say, and think.

Live a Life of Love.
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you” (Eph. 5:1, 2). Christians are to imitate God. This is a remarkable statement. But what Paul means specifically is explained in the next statement: “walk in love, just as Christ also loved you.” D. M. Lloyd-Jones is perfectly right when he says, “the Christian life must always be thought of in these terms. Love! There is the great first principle.”[x]

Let Love Be Genuine.
“Let love be without hypocrisy” (Rom. 12:9). Paul declares that his whole ministry was characterized by “genuine love” (2 Cor. 6:6). Love can be an outward show, not an inward reality. There can be play-acting love and Sunday-morning-only love. That is why John warns, “Let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18).

Speaking Truth with Love
In stark contrast with those who use falsehood and deceitful methods when teaching, Paul urges “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). Whether defending or proclaiming the truth it must be done by means of love. Truth and love should never be separated. “Take love from truth,” states James M. Boice, “The result is bitter orthodoxy. Truth remains but it is proclaimed in such an unpleasant, harsh manner that it fails to win anybody.”[xi]

Love Builds Up.
“Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies [builds up]” (1 Cor. 8:1). The nature of love is to build people up, not tear down. Love is in the construction business, not the destruction business. A fundamental principle of church life is that everything is to be done for the “edification” of the church (1 Cor. 14:26). So as Nathaniel Vincent comments, “The more love abounds among the members of the church, the more the whole body will be edified.”[xii]

Love Covers.
“Keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). Fervent love for one another is absolutely necessary in the church because “love covers a multitude of sins.” Love covers all kinds of offenses, injuries, wrongs, and sins that we experience at the hands of others. Without love covering we could never live and work together.

Love Disciplines and Restores.
“Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline” (Rev. 3:19). Love has both a stern and tender side. Love “abhor[s] what is evil” (Rom. 12:9) because evil of any kind destroys people and dishonors God. It is the nature of love to protect, warn, rebuke, and discipline loved one. But love’s nature also forgives, restores, and heals broken relationships (2 Cor. 2:4-11).

Love Grows.
Paul prays, “may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all people” (1 Thess. 3:12) and “that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment” (Phil. 1:9). The wonderful truth about love is that it can increase and overflow all human boundaries. There are no limits to our growth in Christlike love.

Love Unites.
Christian people have “been knit together in love” (Col. 2:2). The New Testament issues many pleas for church unity. But without love, viable unity is an impossible dream. Love is what unites Christians so that they can together move toward the common goal of maturity in Christ: “Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity [or completeness]” (Col. 3:14).

Love Is the Sum of the Law.
Love is the one, all-embracing command that fulfills, summarizes, and puts into practice the law: “For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10).

Love Is the More Excellent Way.
“And I show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31). The greatest spiritual gifts imaginable and the most extraordinary services rendered to others are nothing if love is absent: “And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor…but do not have love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3).

Love Never Fails.
“Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13:8). All spiritual gifts will someday cease (1 Cor. 13:8). But love is permanent; it is for now and eternity. Jonathan Edwards describes heaven as “a world of holy love”[xiii] and “the paradise of love.”[xiv]

Love Is the Greatest.
“But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). Every Christian is to be marked by faith, hope, and love. This blessed triad of virtues is foundational to vital Christian living and to a maturing local church. Yet, even among the three cardinal virtues, Paul can say, “the greatest of these is love.”
So there you have it, a quick bird’s eye view of Jesus’ and the apostles’ principle teaching on love. We will now turn in the next chapter to the classic passage that demonstrates that love is indispensable to Christian leadership, 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

[i] W. R. Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody (1985 reprint ed., Westwood: Barbour and Company, n.d.), 128.
[ii] Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody, 127.
[iii] Richard Ellsworth Day, Bush Aglow quoted in George Sweeting, Love is the Greatest (Chicago: Moody, 1974), 40.
[iv] I. Howard Marshall, 1 Peter, IVPNTCS (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1991), 143.
[v] 1 John 2:3-6; 3:10-18; 4:7-21
[vi] Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 467, 468.
[vii] Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 810.
[viii] James Moffatt, Love in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929),???
[ix] Also Rom. 12:17; 13:8; 1 Thess. 5:15; Gal. 6:10; 1 Peter 2:17).
[x] D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12, Christian Conduct (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2000), 336.
[xi] James Montgomery Boice, The Epistles of John (Grand Rapids: Zondervan), ?.
[xii] Nathaniel Vincent, A Discourse Concerning Love (1684; reprint ed., Morgan: Soli Deo Gloria, 1998), 3.
[xiii] Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (1852; reprint ed., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1978), 325.
[xiv] Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, 351.