We now get more general teaching on the attitudes that we should have. We see here the centrality of love, and love is not limited to a romantic or sentimental sense. It must be sincere. The gospel goes to the heart, and deals with the root of man’s problem. It highlights the depths of sin within us, and in its solution starts healing that problem. So love must be sincere, it is not a mere outward expression, nor enlightened self-interest. It springs from a genuine concern for the well-being of others. Now we need a word of practical caution here. If we wait till all our motives are completely sincere then we will never do anything. We can always find some spec of self-interest, we can rarely be completely sure that there is no self-interest in our motives, especially as doing things God’s way is always in our long-term interests. So we must not approach this in a legalistic fashion. Instead we should take a general view of our motives,go forward and let the Holy Spirit correct and teach us as we go along.
And a very practical test of sincere love is clinging to what is good, hating what is evil, and it is interesting that Paul includes hating evil here. In our times this has very pertinent relevance to the whole gay/transgender debate. There are parts of the church that say we should show love to homosexuals (which indeed we should) and in order to do that we should be “gay affirming”. Such views are dressed up as loving and caring, but they are not, they are an example of insincere love. If it is never truly loving to encourage someone to continue sinning against God.
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