Love is a very complicated thing in the Bible and so we are going to treat it very seriously. The Bible shows us that God’s love is emotional and active and also very interested in justice and mercy. And of course, we can’t talk about love without mentioning Mister Rogers!
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.
I guess it was about two years ago that I decided to start teaching you guys about the fruit of the Spirit as it came up in the story of Abraham (or not) but what does that even mean? Well, the Spirit is God’s Holy Spirit who comes to live with us when we make Jesus our King. The Spirit is just amazing! The Spirit immediately starts to change us into people who can become more like Jesus—people who can be truly human the way God intended in the beginning. But the Spirit doesn’t work through rules and laws, no, the Spirit works by changing us inside and out. The work that the Spirit does happens because of what Jesus did on the Cross but also, and this is something we do have control over, our loyalty to Him and His Kingdom. Throughout His teaching and preaching, Jesus told the Jewish people who followed Him about how God’s Kingdom is so different from anything we see around us in the world that some people call it the “Upside down” Kingdom because it doesn’t work by the same rules as our governments. Our governments think we need strong armies and lots of money and to be the biggest and most powerful bully on the block so that we get our way in everything but Jesus said that’s not how He does things. He says we are strong by being weak, and by forgiving instead of getting even. He was telling all of those Jewish men that they needed to act more like women were expected to behave. I doubt that what He said was very popular because we don’t feel safe when we are doing things the Jesus way. I have a secret to tell you though—Jesus’s way works so well that it took less than four hundred years to get rid of the false gods in the Roman Empire. That’s just crazy when you think about it. They had always worshipped false gods but the Christians—the Jews and Gentiles who followed Jesus—just didn’t live their lives like Rome wanted them to. They weren’t afraid to die, for starters, because Jesus had come alive again after the Romans killed Him and He promised that everyone who was loyal to Him would also come back to life after they died too. The Romans were like, “What the heck is wrong with these people??? Why aren’t they afraid of all the terrible things we are going to do to them? We can’t get rid of them because killing them just makes more people want to be like them!”
The early believers had no power and sometimes no friends except for one another. Slaves and their owners sat next to one another in services as equals. Rich people and poor people did too, and men and women both taught about Jesus as Prophets, Teachers, and Preachers and travelled from place to place telling people about Jesus as Apostles and Evangelists. What they were teaching must have sounded absolutely crazy—about a God who loves even the poorest and most powerless and is actually even on their side when they are being treated unfairly. God was like the total opposite of the leaders of the Roman Empire and their gods, who were every bit as terrible as humans could be except they were worse because they had more power. The early believers, when they could, kept the Sabbath and got called lazy by Roman writers for taking a day off of work. We also know that by seventy years after Jesus died and rose again, they were meeting before and after work on Sundays too because it was on a Sunday that Jesus came to life again. It’s hard to imagine people now going to church before work and after work but these people couldn’t get enough of Jesus. They couldn’t get enough of Jesus because they were being taught about what love really is—and that’s something their own gods and leaders didn’t seem to know anything about. Their gods and leaders lived by power and money, not by love and mercy like Jesus.
Jesus’s way of living life for God shouldn’t have worked but it did. People, more and more, began turning away from their pagan gods and toward Jesus. That doesn’t mean their governments changed, unfortunately. When the Emperor Constantine decided he was a Christian, less than three hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead, he did like the worst possible thing—he actually decided to go and fight people and say it was for Jesus. That’s messed up because Jesus told us that we need to love not only our neighbors but love and bless our enemies. And here was Constantine thinking that he could go kill people to make the world more Christian! Yikes. And the people who ran the church began to change too—one very famous one decided that it could be okay to go and fight against people who didn’t accept Jesus as their King. But if Jesus asked God to forgive the Roman soldiers who crucified Him, do we really think He wants us going out and killing innocent people just because they don’t know Him? I mean, if they are dead then they can’t know Him at all! Unfortunately, Constantine’s army made the church feel so safe that we haven’t ever really gotten over it and now we don’t feel safe unless we can win fights with weapons. But the first Christians managed to change the entire Roman Empire for the better without one single soldier. We see the same thing now in places where it is against the law to trust in Jesus—when the people of Jesus don’t have any power then He gets all the credit for the miracles that happen. There are so many amazing books about the love of Jesus changing lives in places like Communist Russia, Iran and Iraq, China, and so many other places where they will kill people who become Jesus followers. Jesus is going to win there, that’s for sure, and He doesn’t need an army to kill His enemies. He wants His enemies to follow Him and know God’s love and the healing power of the Holy Spirit. The early Christians saved babies left out to die, cared for the sick in the first hospitals and made clothes for the poor and took care of the people who were suffering—which was totally weird in a world where people only cared about their own families.
Love was a big surprise to the whole world and even to the Jews. The Jews knew that God loved them but they didn’t have any idea that God loved the whole world full of people and wanted to save them all. It made some of them so angry that they tried to kill Jesus when He reminded the people of his own hometown how God had blessed the gentiles in the past and wanted to do it again. It was even hard for Jesus’s own disciples to figure it out—took them about ten years! But once they understood that God loves the whole world, they went out in all directions from Jerusalem to teach the world about Jesus. They finally understood that God has too much love for just one group of people. Not only that, but God deserves to be worshipped and loved by absolutely everyone and not just a small group of people. God loved the world so much that He didn’t want everyone suffering because of the evil of sin and death and the terrible things that powerful people were doing to them. God loved the world so much that He sent Jesus to rescue all of us in a sneak attack on Satan’s own turf. Satan thought he could kill Jesus and be rid of Him but what really happened is that he was inviting Jesus into his own home and that was a big mistake. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we do know that when it was done, Jesus was alive again in a perfect body that could walk through walls and stuff. That’s our proof that there isn’t anything anyone can do to us to keep us away from God’s love. If Satan couldn’t do it then no one can. The early Christians understood that and so they weren’t afraid of being dead. When we aren’t afraid of being dead, Satan doesn’t really have any ability to get us over on his side.
But what is love? It’s one thing to say God loved us so much that Jesus came to kill sin and death for us, and quite another thing to wonder what it looks like in our own lives. One of my favorite Bible teachers said this once, “Love is doing what is in another person’s best interests.” That means that when we love someone, we do the very best things for them that we can as far as what they need. That doesn’t mean taking them to Disney World or whatever, that’s not the kind of best thing I am talking about. It means that everyone, you and me too, have things that will help us to be the very best people we can be. Some of those things are obvious—like food and clothes and a safe place to live and nice, clean water. Other things are less obvious, like welcoming them into our churches as equals, protecting them from injustice (things that aren’t fair), and just doing for them as we would want people to do for us. When someone needs safety, and we can give that to them, loving them means we do all that we can to make sure they are safe. During the second World War, some Christians in Europe hid the people whom the Nazis wanted to kill—people who were Jews, black, mentally disabled, gypsies, and anyone who was getting in the way of them doing whatever they wanted. Most people didn’t help. They might have felt bad about what was happening but they were scared. And others believed that the Jews and the rest deserved it. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis, told everyone over and over again for many years that the Jews were responsible for every terrible thing that had happened to them. Which was silly because it was the German government’s own fault for being one of the countries who started World War 1 in the first place. When they lost everything, Hitler rose to power by choosing someone else to blame for what happened and told the German people that they deserved to be on top and not on the bottom. And so, people began to hate the Jews and everyone else who wasn’t “normal.” It is sad that the people started to not want to love the Jews anymore, to start hating their neighbors but you know what? When times seem bad and people don’t want to blame themselves for their own problems, it is very tempting to just blame someone else instead. Hitler made all of the Jews seem not only responsible for all of Germany’s problems but also evil, and criminals in the eyes of the German people. And once he did that, even though it wasn’t true, people didn’t ask questions or get angry when they started being taken away from their homes, or when they just disappeared entirely. This is why love is so important.
If they had loved the Jews, or if people in my own country had loved the Native Americans or Blacks or the Japanese Americans, then they would have wanted what was best for them. I always say it this way—“If it isn’t good enough for my kids then it isn’t good enough for your kids either.” Sometimes we forget that the Jews, or the Native Americans, or whoever, isn’t just a group but a community made up of a whole bunch of people who are just as special and wonderful as everyone else. When we start to see that, we begin to love the way Jesus does. But usually, we don’t like the people who are different or far away or speak different languages. That’s why it is so easy for leaders like Hitler to convince us that we are special and deserving but those other groups aren’t. Would you like for people to see you as different in a bad way just because of the color of your skin or the language you speak or the place you were born? Of course not, and that’s why we need to learn about the love of God—and God doesn’t care about any of those things. Because God isn’t like us, we need to imitate Him. If God was like us, then other people might really not like Him at all and we might even see them like we see animals. But God isn’t a human being. God doesn’t have DNA and chromosomes so He isn’t a man or a woman. God isn’t like us but that doesn’t stop Him from loving us and wanting to live with us forever. You know why He wants that for us? Because that’s what is best for us. That’s what is best for absolutely everyone on the planet.
It is better for us to love and follow and obey and know God than it is for us to hate and ignore and disobey Him. If we are really loving Him, then we will be good neighbors to everyone and loving them by doing whatever is best for them. And let me tell you, that is a hard thing to want to do and even harder to do. It can be scary to love others and especially when they are being mean and doing bad things. Also, there are no rules for exactly what it looks like to love another person. There are some things we shouldn’t ever do because it isn’t what is best for them, and things we should always do, like pray for them. Different people need different things. Some people have plenty of food but what they need is someone to listen to them because they are lonely. Giving them food wouldn’t be loving, it would just be kinda weird. It wouldn’t be hateful either, just unnecessary. You’d be better off not spending time cooking and staying longer to listen to them instead or maybe helping them with something they can’t do for themself. Loving others means paying attention to what is best for them. Sometimes someone needs money and sometimes giving them money is the worst thing you can do. Love can be very tricky, which you will learn as you get older. There is never just one answer that works for everyone. That’s kinda like how hate works—when you just look at a group of people are decide that they are all exactly the same. Yikes, that doesn’t even make sense.
The other day, I had to deal with a very hateful person. She was hateful because she was really scared of certain people. She said they were all bad, all criminals, all horrible and that anyone who said differently was crazy. She made me sad because she wanted terrible things to happen to the entire group and didn’t feel the least bit sorry about it. It was like she was talking about wild coyotes coming after her chickens or something (and no one wants that), instead of people—some of whom are wonderful and others who are awful. Love wants what is best for others but hatred generally wants what we think is best for us. Hitler told the German people that if they just got rid of all the Jews, they would have a golden age that would last for a thousand years and they would be on top of the world with the biggest army and the most money and power and recessive genes and all of that. He said that the Jews were the only thing holding them back, along with a few other groups that he wanted the Germans to hate too. When the Germans decided that sounded good to them, it made it easier to ignore the terrible things that were being done to men, women, and children. First, they had to wear yellow stars on their clothes, so that everyone could look at how different they were, and then people were allowed to trash and destroy their businesses, and then they were all crowded into tiny parts of the cities called ghettos where they were trapped and couldn’t escape, and then they were taken to concentration camps where most were murdered. That’s how hate works, it creeps up on us. Hitler wanted people to think of the Jews as different than Germans, but not different from each other because he wanted people to see them as strange, evil, and dangerous. Of course, they weren’t any of these things, but Hitler made them look that way and people believed it. It was easier than admitting that they had gotten themselves into trouble back in WWI.
You know what the most terrible thing of all was? Right before it all started happening, 99% of the Germans were Christians—mostly Protestants. Less than 1% were Jewish. They went to church and sang hymns and listened to stories about Jesus—but not in the way they should have been taught. Do you know what that means? It means that Christians can do terrible, evil things even when they believe they are doing the right things. Like here in my country with slavery and placing Japanese Americans into internment camps out in the desert during WWII. Just because people read the Bible and go to church and say they love Jesus doesn’t mean that they know how to love others. Love is really hard to get right but we are supposed to let Jesus teach us all about it and we are also supposed to let the Holy Spirit grow love inside us. After all, it is impossible for us to love someone else—which is to do whatever is best for them—unless God helps us a whole lot. But it is super easy to hate people, to be jealous and suspicious, and to see them as a problem. Good thing for us that Jesus doesn’t think like that because compared to Him, we are all of those terrible things and a whole lot more! If Jesus is so good and perfect and doesn’t hate us, then it is really hard to come up with good reasons to hate other people and especially whole other groups of people. And you know what? If Germany really was 99% Christian people who loved their neighbors, he couldn’t ever have gone to war if they had said no. All those people who died, including the people he hated, wouldn’t have died because he couldn’t have done it. You can’t fight a war without an army! Same thing with the bad stuff we have done in my own country. Just because someone says they love Jesus, doesn’t mean that they do. If we are cruel and hateful, it means that we don’t really know or love Him at all. That’s why God has to change us so that all the different parts of love start working together inside us. And it doesn’t happen right away either! It sure takes a while and some people just never change.
What are all the different parts of love? We’ve already talked about them. Love means being happy and joyful, and not jealous, when something good happens to someone else. Love means crying with the people who are sad because something terrible has happened. Love means not picking fights and trying to be at peace with others as much as possible—and that’s not just hands and feet but our words too! Love means being as patient with others as God is with us because I can for sure tell you that if God wasn’t patient, I would be scorched by lightning bolts to my butt so many times that I would smell like a burnt roast in the oven. Love means understanding that not everyone understands everything right away and some people will never understand some things at all. Like me with reading sheet music even though I have a beautiful singing voice. If you want me to sing the right notes, you need to put me next to someone else singing the same part and I will just do whatever they do because I am really good at copying what someone else is singing. Love means being kind and never cruel, making peoples’ lives better and never worse. Love means being generous and not greedy—not only with our money but in the way we think of other people and when we are talking with them. Being generous means giving other people the benefit of the doubt and not assuming the worst just because we don’t agree with them about something or if they spell something wrong. Love means being trustworthy, so that others don’t have to worry about us being unfair or unjust or tricky or manipulative or whatever. Love means being loyal to God, and when we are loyal to God, people can trust us to do what is right. Love means being gentle, which is always about not doing whatever it is we can do just because we are stronger, richer, more powerful, more popular, smarter, or more influential to hurt others. God has all the power in the universe and we still don’t smell like burnt roasts so He is definitely being gentle with us. Love means that just because we can do something bad and get away with it, we don’t. Love also means that we can control ourselves when we are dealing with others and especially when we are angry. If God had no self-control, then we’d all be dead for sure.
Love also means that we don’t boast and brag about ourselves to impress people or make them feel badly about themselves. Love means that we are humble, which means that we aren’t always sure we are right about everything, or know everything, or have some sort of special relationship with God that makes us better than others. Love means that we want to live in ways that show people that Jesus is real. Love means that we are merciful and don’t do the terrible things we could do to get even with others. Love also means telling people we love when they need to stop doing things that are hurting others, but unless we are also doing everything I have already mentioned, we can’t really be trusted to do that either because we won’t do it in a truly loving way. Love means that we work hard to become the kinds of people that folks listen to and care about what we are saying. There are so many hateful people out there, boasting and bragging and saying nasty, cruel things and so when they say, “such and such is wrong” people are like, “are you kidding me? You are the nastiest person I know. I am not listening to you. You wouldn’t know what is good if it came up and kicked you in the butt.” Oh, and love doesn’t kick anyone in the butt, okay? Don’t make me hear about you guys kicking anyone at all, okay?
I want people to care about what you have to say—not because you are smart or rich or strong or popular—but because you are good, kind and honest. If you don’t know who Mister Rogers is, make sure you look him up on YouTube. When I was growing up, Mister Rogers taught me how to be like Jesus even though he never mentioned the name of Jesus. And everyone loved Mister Rogers because they knew he loved them right back. Everyone cared about what Mister Rogers had to say and so when he shared his swimming pool with the black police officer, even though it was against the law to do that in some places, he showed people everywhere that it was a bad law. Just by doing what was right. Mister Rogers was a minister, and boy did he love Jesus!
I love you. I am praying for you. When I say I love you, it means that I want to do what is best for you. That means I study very hard and teach you about Jesus for free, and I always will. It means I don’t just want to teach you about the people in the Bible, who did messed up stuff, but about God, who is always good and who is completely different from us. Because I love you, I want you to be just like Jesus and not like all of the messed up people we have to deal with in the story of God’s rescue plan to save us. And because I love you, I know you can be like Jesus—not perfectly like Him, but more and more like Him all the time.