“Let your daily actions witness: Christ will come again” - Day 4

Colossians 3:14

14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 

Here is a sixth garment to wear – love joins the five listed in vs. 12 (Monday’s reading) holding those five in place. To play with the clothing image – maybe like a belt.

Ancient Greek had four words for love.

1. Phileo is affection for and comradery with friends. This type of love often focuses on our preferences, culture, tastes and experiences. When surrounded by friends, you get that warm fuzzy feeling of phileo. This is basically friendship love.

 2. Storge is a familial love. Unlike phileo, storge is often based on duty and obligation. To love the difficult relative, we don’t exactly like them, but we do love them. Apart from the bond of family or obligation would have almost nothing to do with them. 

 3. Eros is the romantic, passionate love seen in movies, the high of infatuation experienced in an early relationship. People may say, “I love you” when overwhelmed by eros, but it is not the true love of a deeper, lasting relationship. This is the love of “falling in love.”

 4. Agape is an unconditional love. Normally, an individual loves one another person for a reason – kinship, shared experiences, interests, or something else they gain from the relationship. Agape love does not care what the other person can or cannot do for us. The love is unconditional. This is the love that Jesus had in dying on the cross for us.

 It is this fourth word for love that Paul uses in this verse. An unconditional love that loves enemies, that forgives hurts, that cares for people who do not deserve to be shown compassion, that is kind to strangers and to people who are difficult, that is patient. This is the love that holds everything together in perfect balance.

 PRAYER:

God of love, your Son Jesus Christ has shown us the power and depth of love. Shape our lives that we would be people who daily bear witness to his coming again through our acts and attitudes of self-going love. In Jesus’ name. Amen.