Why are Christians sometimes bad at loving one another?

The command in 1 Peter 1:22 is to “love one another earnestly from a pure heart.” Peter surrounds the command with two supports, as we’ll see tomorrow. He is making an airtight argument for how Christians love one another.

As Christians, inherent to who we are, no matter where we turn, we can’t escape from loving one another, but if this is true, why can it be so hard for us?

Why are Christians sometimes bad at loving one another?

I’ll talk about this more in the sermon, but below are two reasons I won’t get to on Sunday. 

1. The meaning of love is distorted. 

First, I want to question the question. In order to assess whether Christians are good at loving one another, we have to understand what love is. 

Two common misunderstandings of love is, one, people think that love means to embrace every worldview as equally true and valid. 

This is the idea that says to love somebody you cannot call them wrong. And yeah, we just simply reject that. 

Because the very center of our faith is the cross of Jesus Christ, and at the cross God said “you’re wrong” and “you’re loved.” You’re wrong as in you’re a sinner; you’re loved as in Jesus died for you. So wrong that you require atonement; so loved that I sacrifice my Son. 

The second misunderstanding of love is the idea that love is an experience determined by whether a person feels loved. 

That’s an impossible target. I can’t help that you don’t like Mac-n-cheese. This is what we’re having for lunch, from the love of my heart, and if you don’t feel loved by that, it’s your problem. (That’s a random example; all my kids eat Mac-n-cheese.)

In sum, If we’re going to make any kind of decent assessment on how we love, we need to know what love is. And according to the Bible, genuine love is an overflow of our joy in God that gladly seeks to meet the needs of others (I’ve written more about that here). So the question of whether Christians love one another is the question of whether Christians do that. 

Does our joy in God overflow in our seeking to meet the needs of others?

2. Some “Christians” are not really Christians. 

Now, this is more sobering point of why some “Christians” might be bad at loving others. It could be because they’re not really Christians.

And I’m taking this straight from the book of 1 John. 

The apostle John tells us that a reliable mark of our conversion is love. Our love for others grounds our assurance that indeed we are Christians.

1 John 3:14, “We know that we have passed out of death to life, because we love the brothers.”

And John says this over and over again, in 3:18 and 4:7, and 12, and 21; and 5:1.

We are assured we are Christians because of our love for one another, and so the corollary is also true: if we don’t love one another we can’t be assured we’re Christians.

A Christian who doesn’t love is not one, according to the apostle John. That might be why loving others is so hard for some. 

There’s one more reason as well, and we’ll tackle that one tomorrow, by God’s grace.

I’ll also explain this image of Peter.