A few years ago, I was invited to speak about mission to a gathering of underground church leaders on Zoom. I started by describing our organization’s purpose, which begins with, “With love and respect...” I referred to this once again during the session. At the end, more than one person said, “Thanks for reminding us about the centrality of love.” Given how little I focused on this, I was pleasantly surprised that it stood out to the participants.

Love Often Assumed, Rarely Highlighted

In our missions endeavor, we busy ourselves with many activities: learning language, translating the Bible, engaging with people, mobilizing, training, sending, and overseeing workers. We assume love is there in all of this—we certainly agree that love is important. But how much do we make it explicit? Are we looking for it as a motivation of new recruits or team members? Are stories of love in action included in our agendas, measured in our reports, and placed at the forefront of our conferences? How great is the Great Commandment in our thoughts and practice?

The New Commandment

This is, of course, a broad topic. We could talk about God’s love for us and the world, our love for God, and even our love for “the lost” or a particular people group. But I will focus on an aspect that sometimes gets less attention—loving one another. This is the new commandment of Jesus to us, given the night before his death, tying it integrally to the core of the gospel.

One of the several metaphors in the New Testament to describe the Church is the Body of Christ (Eph 1:22–23; Col 1:24). We, as his disciples, are the visible, living expression of Jesus on the earth today. I would therefore frame our part in God’s mission like this: We are the embodiment of God’s love in Jesus to all peoples. Seen through this lens, we would tune in intently to anything Jesus said to describe how the world sees us.

And this is what we find Jesus saying to his disciples just before his death and resurrection, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).

Why the Commandment Is New

Why is this a new commandment? Did not Jesus already refer to the Old Testament law of love as the greatest commandment? In pointing to Leviticus 19:18, Jesus acknowledged what all Jews knew—that they should love their neighbors as they loved themselves. This was a high standard for the day. But Jesus raised this to yet another level. The new kingdom principle was not just to treat others like yourself (that is, justly and compassionately) but to think of others as more important than yourself.

To show his disciples exactly what he meant in a practical way, Jesus washed their feet—something a rabbi would not have been required to do to keep the old commandment. And his final act showed beyond doubt what he meant when he humbly and sacrificially gave up his life for his friends.

Loving each other, as Jesus loved, goes beyond normal ethical borders and the Law of Moses. It is the distinct marker of identity as Jesus’ followers and empowers our witness of being restored to God and others. It is part of what carries us beyond the borders of comfort and culture as we embody the love of God to all nations.

Historical Example of Love in Mission

The Jesuits are one of the longest-lasting and most impactful apostolic religious organizations in history. According to author Chris Lowney, one of the core values of early Jesuits was love: “Teams were bound by loyalty and affection.”1 This both attracted others to join and sustained far-flung efforts in the face of the hardest obstacles. The persevering nature of this kind of love is vital in today’s aspirations to serve those with least access to the gospel—often in the most difficult places.

When Love Gets Hard

Love also sustains ongoing motivation to persevere when it gets tough with those on your own team or in your organization. Some of my most difficult experiences of relational betrayal and hurt have come from those with whom I worked closely. But prompts by God to love, led me to pursue peace as much as was in my power, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive, and to take some deep dives in personal reflection and repentance. These experiences, seen in hindsight, deepened my encounter with God as well as my love for colleagues. In fact, some of those same people became dearer friends. The people we live among may not always see all of this, but it makes a difference. The Bible promises that those who love, abide in God, and he in them. That spiritual power will be felt and seen.

In 1 John 4:20, “… for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” If those thinking about engaging in mission are not experiencing and practicing love in the community in which they live, how will they share a message of what God’s love looks like in a foreign culture? Loving one another before going to serve in mission is a natural bridge to cross cultures with a love for distant peoples.

Paul the Example

The famous “love” passage, 1 Corinthians 13, was written by Paul who is often cited as the premier model for frontier mission. In it, he revealed that deeper than knowledge, boldness, or feats of faith was the true motivation of his heart. I once wrote a paraphrase of the beginning of 1Corinthians 13 for my context. It goes like this:

If I speak in the heart language of my focus people group, but do not have love, I am only a fluent gong. If I have the gift of pioneering and can fathom all cultural mysteries and all missiology, and if I have a faith that can believe for big numbers, but do not have love, I am zero. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to go to hard places (and sometimes I may boast about it), but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Paul and his team’s motivation is again clear when he writes about engaging with the Thessalonians, “But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess 2:7–8). It’s hard to imagine that this collective expression of love was not also true within Paul’s team. Loving one another has a way of spilling out to others.

Practical Ways to Stir Up Love

Matthew 24:12 challenges each generation to measure the temperature of its love—it can grow cold. An active, sacrificial, truth-anchored affection for God, neighbor, and each other will be visible. We should reflect on how it is showing up in our lives. Perhaps it could be a regular rhythm of a team’s conversations.

The “one anothers” of the New Testament are very helpful for reminding us how to work out love in practical ways. Beyond mere sentiment and words, the more than fifty occasions of “one another” in Scripture will surely surface some actions and attitudes we can refresh or repent of.

Ask for feedback from friends, spouse, colleagues, pastors, or coaches. We might think we are doing just fine, but there will be actionable insights from honest, caring ones in the community.

A good friend, Von Gelder, said recently, “Love is the hardest thing we ever do.” I agree. Let us make sure it is not the thing we hardly do.