Love is action and if it is not in action, it is not love. This is a pretty basic statement about love that most would have no problem with. The more difficult statement to swallow is that true love leads to “like” and “like” completes love.
You have probably heard someone say they love someone but they just don’t like them. I would tell you they don’t really love the person, or at the very least, their love is incomplete. Some would even say that God expects us to love, but doesn’t tell us we have to like certain people. I would tell you that is the easy way out. Granted, this is not a clearly stated idea from scripture like the nature and divinity of Jesus or other creedal beliefs, but can you imagine Jesus walking up to any of his twelve disciples, even Judas, and saying, “I love you, but I just don’t like you.” Can you imagine Jesus walking up to even the filthiest of sinners and telling them he loves them but doesn’t like them?
To like someone is sometimes harder than to “love” and Jesus always calls us to the hard(er) thing. In 1 John you see the author reminding us of something Jesus taught him, saying “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers...let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”
Laying down life is more than a physical thing. I would say it is at least 1000% more complicated and difficult than giving up your physical life, because dying once is much easier than dying to self every day. Yes Jesus laid down his physical self, but Paul tells us he did much more than that in lowering himself, willfully abandoning his place in heaven and then submitting himself to death on the cross.
Jesus laid down everything else before he laid down his heartbeat. Jesus did the hard(er) thing and calls us to the hard(er) thing.
This is why I believe love is incomplete without “like”.
In 2 Corinthians Paul says because of what Jesus did on the cross, we no longer look at people through our own eyes or a worldly view, “for Christ died for all.” What eyes do we look through then? The eyes of God? And at the end of that same chapter, chapter 5, Paul tells us that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.”
Not only does scripture tell us not to evaluate men from our flesh’s perspective or the worldly view, but then Paul really hits us with it and tells us why. Jesus didn’t just take our sins from us, but became our sins. He became the very things we don’t like about people. We read Romans 5:8 describing how Jesus died for us even “while” we were still sinners and forget that he “became” the “while”. Jesus didn’t just remove but embodied. Jesus didn’t just cleanse, but became.
Do I think we have to like everything about everyone? No, that isn’t what I’m saying, what I am saying is I think the things we don’t like about a person become our reasons to not like the person. In our flesh we have a very hard time separating these things. We easily slip from not liking something to not liking someone and lying to ourselves that at least we love them.
This is why Jesus can Like and Love: he can separate the “things” from the person. Jesus created the person in his own image and became our every fault on the cross.
Now think about not “liking” someone. You look at them and there is something that rubs you the wrong way and so you choose to love them and settle or even choose to not like them, but what you choose to not like is the very thing Jesus became. Pride. Arrogance. Filth and Lust. Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. Hate. Etc…Etc…or even worse, a character flaw! These things, these sins are Jesus. And this is why Jesus can both Love and Like, because he doesn’t have our perspective, he has “their” perspective. He knows exactly where they are and why they are the way they are, because he became what they are.
Most of our inability to like comes from our unwillingness to seek first to understand and then to be understood.
Loving is a command, it is a very clearly worded statement from the mouth of our God. And so we blindly love. We lump all peoples into this love but we segment a few and a fold into the “love without like” category and convince ourselves it is not sin because we are fulfilling the command to love. But love is not general; it is specific.
If love is a command than “like” is a choice, and Jesus is calling to the hard(er) thing. To like is to complete love. Remember, Jesus has no reason to like you, for you are filthy and dirt stained rags. Except, he became and embodied your very worst. So when he looks at you, don’t be surprised to hear him say, “I like you” even before he confesses his undoubted love for you.
Ask yourself if it is easier to love a certain person than it is to like them. If you have put them into the “love not like” category, you can be sure Jesus is calling you to the harder thing…to like them. And if it isn't Jesus saying it's okay to love and not like, who is the one whispering this in our ears?
One last thought. We all know someone that just seems to like everyone, and for some reason, everyone wants to be like that person.
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