Christian love would oblige us to hold off from urging one another over the points of difference. Some try vehemently to get others to comply with them, either by flattery or by threats. Would love let me violate someone else’s conscience in any way? The love I bear to a fellow-Christian, if it is true, would no more let me do that than hurt the apple of my own eye.

In difficult times for the church, we need to think of how to comfort and encourage each other’s hearts. When the Apostle Paul was striving to achieve this for believers in the churches of Colosse and Laodicea (and others he hadn’t even met), he identified two means — knitting together in love, and getting a clearer grasp of their shared faith. Disunity is both a sign of lack of love and something which hinders love and hence comfort. Perhaps we tend to underestimate how discouraging it is for ordinary believers to be separated by church divisions — which inherently thwart expressions of love between Christian and Christian — especially when the denominational boundaries do not reflect differences in the key doctrines we confess. Some of the distress of our hearts would be alleviated if we were more united. John Howe (1630–1705), a highly respected presbyterian minister in London who was ejected in 1662, saw this clearly. In the following extract from his sermon on Paul’s words, Howe identifies nine ways that love knits believers to each other, so as to build each other up and comfort their hearts.

In Colossians 2:2, the apostle’s blessed purpose is “to comfort their hearts,” and he conceives two means which would be most effective in attaining it: love and faith.

“That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ.”

This comfort would be achieved, more or less, if they were knit or compacted together in love, made all of a piece, cohering and clinging to one another by love.

What is Christian love?

The kind of love which is meant here is specified by what it is conjoined with, “the understanding and acknowledgment of the mystery of Christianity.” It must be the love of Christians to one another as such.

It is not the love which we owe to one another as humans merely. That would be to enlarge it too much. For then we would be as much obliged to love the enemies we

are to unite against as the friends of religion we are to unite with, since all partake equally in human nature. We are to love the children of God in a different way from the children of men.

Also, it is not a love to Christians of this or that denomination only. That would be to equally unduly restrict it. This love is owing to Christians as such, and just as it belongs to them only, so it belongs to all of them who confess genuine Christianity in profession and practice. To limit our Christian love to a sub-group of Christians is so far from leading to “comforting our hearts” that it resists and defeats this end. Instead of a preservative union, it implies most destructive divisions, and scatters what it should collect and gather.

At the same time, I am not to distribute this holy love so indiscriminately as to place it at random on every one who thinks it convenient to call himself a Christian (even though I ought to love the very profession, while I do not know who makes it in sincerity). But let me once get a right grasp of the true essentials of Christianity (whether in doctrinal or vital principles), then my love will extend duly to all in whom these are found, and I come actually to apply it to this or that person as particular occasions arise. In this way I shall always be in a preparation of mind actually to unite in Christian love with every such person, whenever such occasions invite me to it.

What does Christian love do?

What would such an impartial, truly Christian, love do towards the preservation of us all, and to prevent the ruin of Christianity?

Gives life

How greatly it would contribute to the vigour of the Christian life! Then we would all equally hold the head, “from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God” (Col 2:19). In this way (as it is in the parallel text), “speaking the truth in love, we shall grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body, unto the edifying of itself in love” (Eph. 4:15–16).

As obstructions in the natural body that hinder the free circulation of blood lead to languishing, so the lack of love in the body of Christ shrivels up the destitute parts, and hinders the diffusion of a nourishing, vital influence.

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