He Comes Down to Teach It

This is the heart of everything, so walk slowly here.

A book cannot teach you to love. I told you that on the first page and I will tell you again now, because it is the truest thing I know about what you are holding. Love is not a lesson you study until you have it. It is a fire that has to be lit from another fire. And there is only one fire old enough and large enough to light yours.

So God does not send you a book about love and walk away. He comes Himself.

Paul wrote a line that is easy to read past, and I do not want you to miss it:

"Now on the topic of brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another." — 1 Thessalonians 4:9 (NET)

Taught by God. Not taught about love. Taught love — by the only Teacher who is, Himself, the thing being taught. You do not learn this the way you learn your sums, by studying until you understand. You learn it the way a cold child learns warmth: by being held against someone warm until the warmth gets inside you.

And here is how He does it. Paul says it plainly in another place: God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom He gave us. Read that again. Not a love about God. Not a love that resembles His. The love that God is, poured into you, taking up residence where you live. So that the next time you manage to love someone you did not think you could love — that is not you, scraping the bottom of your own thin supply. That is His love, the love that was poured in, finding its way back out. The Teacher does not stand at the front of the room. He moves in.

But long before He poured His Spirit into anyone, He was already teaching love the patient way — the way you teach a small child, by doing the thing in front of them, over and over, until they catch it.

He taught it the first time anyone ever failed Him. When the man and woman stood there in their fig leaves, ashamed, hiding — God made them real clothes out of skins and covered them with His own hands. Think about that. He did not wait for them to stop being ashamed before He would help. He covered them first. The very first thing He did after the very first thing we did wrong was cover our shame.

He taught it through a man named Hosea, and this lesson is a hard one. God told Hosea to marry a woman He already knew would be unfaithful — who would break his heart, again and again. Why would God ask such a thing of a man? Because He wanted Hosea to feel, in his own body, what it is to love someone who keeps walking away. He did not hand Hosea a lecture on faithful love. He handed him a breaking marriage, and let the heartbreak teach him what God's own heart had felt for years, loving a people who would not stay. That is sometimes how He teaches. Not with gentle words. With your own life.

He taught it through the Psalms — a hundred and fifty songs, holding every single thing a human heart can hold. Joy and fury. Thanksgiving and despair. There is one — Psalm 88 — that goes down into the dark and never turns back toward the light, that ends in the shadows, and He kept it in the book on purpose, to tell you He can hold even that. Why keep the whole range, the bright and the bitter both? Because you cannot understand what love that endures forever means until you have stood somewhere you desperately needed it to endure. You cannot know what comfort is until you have grieved. You cannot know what mercy is until you have needed it badly. The dark is not a detour around the lesson. The dark is part of the lesson.

And then He taught it on the last night, in a borrowed room. Jesus got up from supper, took off His outer robe, wrapped a towel around His waist like the lowest servant in the house, knelt down on the floor, and washed His friends' dirty feet. He washed the feet of the man who would sell Him before morning. He washed the feet of the man who would swear, three times, that he had never known Him. He knew exactly what they were going to do. He washed their feet anyway. If you ever want to know what love looks like, do not begin with a definition. Begin there. On the floor. With the towel. With the dust of a traitor's feet on His hands.

And one more thing about this Teacher, which will steady you for what is coming. The Scriptures say of Jesus that He learned obedience through what He suffered. Even Him. Even the Son learned the hard way, in a real human life, through real pain. So when the lessons get hard for you — and they will — remember that your Teacher is not asking you to go anywhere He has not gone first.