June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 180 – 29 June
The love that takes hold
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. (2 Corinthians 5:14, NIV)
What makes a person do the difficult, costly, faintly unreasonable things that the watching world struggles to explain? A volunteer spends her holidays in a refugee camp when she could be lying on a beach. A man pours his savings and his evenings into a cause that will never repay him a single penny. Someone surrenders a comfortable career to serve in a place most people would carefully avoid. Looked at coldly, from the outside, such choices can seem almost senseless, and yet there is always an engine humming somewhere beneath them, driving them on. Nobody sustains that kind of self-giving on willpower alone, gritting their teeth through a lifetime of sacrifice by sheer force of obligation. Behind every life poured out for others, if you trace it back far enough, you find some powerful affection that has taken hold of the heart, and Paul named the particular love that had taken hold of his.
A love that grips
Writing about the engine of his own relentless life, Paul said simply that the love of Christ compels us. The word translated compels is συνέχω (synechō, meaning to hold fast, to grip, to press in upon), and it is a far stronger, more physical word than our cooler English renderings tend to suggest. The same verb described a crowd pressing in so tightly around a person that they could barely move, and a fever taking such hold of a body that it could think of nothing else. To be in the grip of συνέχω (synechō, meaning to be held fast) is to be seized and constrained by a force you cannot simply shrug off. That is precisely what Paul claimed Christ’s love had done to him. It had taken hold of him and pressed in from every side, urging him onward, leaving him unable to drift back into a small and comfortable existence. This single sentence neatly explains everything else we have considered this month. The willingness to surrender his rights, the readiness to become all things to all people, the punishing discipline of the race, none of it was generated by duty or grit. All of it flowed from a love that had gripped him and refused to let him go.
Driven upstream
Few sights in the natural world capture this strange compelling power better than a river full of salmon in the season of their return. Having spent years out in the wide ocean, the fish turn, all at once, and begin an astonishing journey back to the very stream where their lives began. They drive themselves upriver against the full force of the current, mile after exhausting mile, and when they reach a waterfall barring the way they fling their whole bodies up and at it, again and again, battering themselves against the rock and the falling water until, somehow, they clear it. No fence could hold them back, and no reasoning could talk them out of it, because they are answering a pull far deeper than comfort or self-preservation, an inner compulsion there is simply no denying. Something of that same irresistible drive takes hold of a heart that has been truly seized by love. It will spend itself without counting the cost, press on against every obstacle, and attempt things that cold calculation would call madness, all because love has gripped it and set it moving. This, in the end, is the secret engine of a life lived for the gospel’s sake. Strip away the love, and the whole enterprise collapses into joyless duty. Let that love take hold, and a person will run the entire race, gladly, all the way to the imperishable crown.
Declaration
I am learning to let love, rather than grim duty, be the engine of everything I do. When I look honestly at the most generous and costly things I have ever managed, I find that none of them were squeezed out of me by obligation, and all of them were drawn out of me by something I cared about deeply. So I stop trying to force myself toward goodness by sheer willpower, and instead let myself be gripped by a love that moves me far more powerfully than any rulebook ever could. A heart that has been truly captured will spend itself gladly, going places and bearing costs that no mere sense of duty would ever persuade it to face. Today I let love take hold of me and carry me forward, certain that the things done because we cannot help but love are the truest and most lasting things we will ever do.
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