How does the Spirit produce love among believers?

Question 4196.

The love among believers that Jesus made the badge of His disciples is not something we work up by trying harder to be nice; it is fruit the Holy Spirit grows. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, He said, if you have love for one another (John 13:35). That is a staggering claim. The world is meant to identify the church not by its buildings or its programmes but by a quality of love between its members that has no natural explanation. And where does such love come from? Not from us. It is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5).

Love is the first fruit He grows

When Paul lists what the Spirit produces in a yielded believer, he heads the list with love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience (Galatians 5:22), and many have noticed that everything which follows is really love in its various clothes. Joy is love rejoicing, peace is love resting, patience is love enduring, kindness is love in action. So the love among believers that marks a healthy church is not an optional extra for the especially warm-hearted; it is the very first thing the Spirit sets about growing in everyone He indwells. I have written at length on this in my answer on the fruit of the Spirit.

This is why I never tell a struggling believer simply to try to love people more. You cannot squeeze this fruit out of yourself by willpower any more than an apple tree can manufacture apples by gritting its bark. Fruit grows from the life within. The love among believers grows because the Spirit of love lives in them, and the way to more of it is not harder striving but closer walking, keeping in step with the Spirit so that His life bears its natural produce in us.

A love that is more than feeling

We have to be clear about what kind of love the Spirit produces, because the word has been worn thin. The love among believers in the New Testament is agape, a love of the will and of action, not chiefly a warm feeling. Paul’s famous description in 1 Corinthians 13 is almost entirely a list of things love does and does not do: love is patient and kind, it does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own way (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). You can practise every one of those toward a person you do not naturally warm to, and that is the point. The Spirit produces a love that chooses the good of the other regardless of how we happen to feel about them.

That is enormously freeing, because it means the command to love the brother who irritates you is not asking you to manufacture an emotion you do not have. It is asking you to act for his good, to be patient with him, to refuse to keep a record of his wrongs, and the Spirit supplies the grace to do exactly that. Feeling often follows action; you frequently come to feel warmth toward someone precisely by serving them in the Spirit’s strength.

He gives us the love we lack

Be honest about the church and you will see why this has to be the Spirit’s work. A congregation is not a gathering of people who chose each other. It is a collection of ages, classes, temperaments and backgrounds thrown together by nothing but a common Saviour, and many of them would never have been friends in the ordinary run of life. The love among believers leaps across the very barriers that divide the world, and only the Spirit can do that. He takes the elderly widow and the awkward teenager, the prosperous professional and the man just out of prison, and binds them in a love that genuinely surprises them.

Paul felt the wonder of it. He told the Thessalonians, you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another (1 Thessalonians 4:9). Taught by God. The instruction in this love is not finally given by a preacher or a book but by the Spirit Himself, who writes love into the heart at conversion and goes on teaching it for a lifetime. When you see a church really loving across its differences, you are watching a miracle, the Spirit doing what no human society can.

Love that flows from being loved

The Spirit produces love among believers partly by making real to us how deeply we ourselves are loved. John puts the logic plainly: we love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). A heart that has been overwhelmed by the love of God in the cross of Jesus begins, almost involuntarily, to overflow toward others. The Spirit’s special work is to pour that divine love into us, to take the truth that Christ died for me and press it so deep that it warms and softens me toward the people around me. Cold hearts toward the brethren are very often hearts that have lost the wonder of being forgiven.

So the cure for a loveless spell is usually not to lecture yourself about loving more but to go back to the foot of the cross and let the Spirit warm you again at the fire of God’s love for you. Forgiven much, we love much (Luke 7:47). The believer who keeps short accounts with God, who lives daily amazed at grace, finds love for others welling up where before there was only duty. The fountain feeds the stream.

Our part in the growing

If the Spirit grows the love, does that leave us nothing to do but wait? Not at all. Peter says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart (1 Peter 1:22). The Spirit has given us a sincere love, and on that basis Peter commands us to love earnestly. We cooperate with the Spirit by putting love into practice, by actually bearing one another’s burdens, forgiving the offence, opening our homes, going to the one we have drifted from. Every such act of obedience feeds the fruit, and every refusal starves it. Not all believers grow this fruit at the same rate, which is part of why I wrote on whether all Christians have all the fruit.

And as this love grows it becomes the strongest guard a church has against fracture, the very thing that keeps the unity the Spirit gave. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8). A congregation rich in Spirit-given love can absorb the offences and frictions that would split a colder fellowship, which is why I link this so closely with the unity of the Spirit. Love is the mortar that holds the living stones together.

Love among believers is the world’s evidence

We should not miss how much hangs on this, because Jesus made the love among believers the proof to a watching world that He is real. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:35). He did not say the world would know us by our arguments, our buildings, or even our doctrine, true and needful as sound doctrine is. He said they would know us by our love. So the love among believers is not a private comfort for the church alone; it is the visible apologetic that makes the gospel believable to outsiders. A cold, quarrelsome church preaches against its own message, while a church genuinely warm with the Spirit’s love commends Jesus before a word is spoken.

Jesus pressed the point even further in His great prayer, asking that His people would be one so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:21). The love among believers, then, is bound up with the salvation of the lost. When the Spirit produces real affection across the differences that usually divide people, the world is faced with something it cannot explain away, and some are drawn to ask where such love comes from. This is why I take any failure of love among believers so seriously. It is not a small domestic matter; it is a stumbling block laid in front of the very people Jesus died to reach.

So, now what?

If love for your fellow believers feels thin and forced, do not begin by scolding yourself into warmer feelings. Begin by going back to how much you are loved, and ask the Spirit to pour that love afresh into your heart. Then put it to work, deliberately, toward the very person you find hardest, with an act of patience or kindness that does not wait for the feeling to arrive. The Spirit grows His fruit as we walk in it. Who is the one believer the Lord is bringing to your mind right now, and what would loving them this week actually look like?

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

John 13:35