Love is a Choice
“Moses…refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer” Heb 11:24-25
Love involves choices. Hard choices. It involves forgiving when you know someone doesn’t deserve it. It involves giving, even when it hurts. It involves huge commitments of time, resources, and energy. It involves laying aside your security; at times, it requires us to lay down our reputations. Love speaks the hard and unpopular things: bringing correction, issuing warnings, even rebuking. Jesus said, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten” (Rev 3:19).
Moses’ choice to identify with and help his people cost him everything. All of history is deeply indebted to Moses not just because he performed great and miraculous deeds, but because he did them from a pure, unadulterated motivation of love.
In the last days, Jesus warned us that our ability to love would be severely tested. Matthew 24:12 says that this happens as a result of an increase of wickedness in the earth that, if we do not guard our hearts diligently, makes us numb to evil. The heart of man is being pushed to the edge. It will either become hard and cold, or it will, by grace, stay hot and soft.
An incident took place in China in 2011 which highlights the depths of apathy to which man has succumbed in our day. A two-year old girl named “Little Yue Yue” wandered out of a store where her mother was shopping and was subsequently run over by two vehicles. As she lay dying on the street, CCV cameras recorded no less that 18 people over the next 7-8 minutes who skirted around her body, ignoring her as she lay there bleeding to death. The rise of ISIS in recent times, with their public beheadings, even burning people alive in cages, has made the barbarous commonplace. We have become desensitized…or have we?
Many have, and more will. But it need not be our destiny. As the time of His appearing nears, we will all be tested in our love. Now, scriptures like “pray for those who persecute you” or “love your enemies”, sound more like catchy religious sayings than they do practical instructions. That is changing. Your love is being tested now in order that it might come forth as gold during the darker times which are coming.
And so it becomes absolutely necessary for Christians to guard our hearts, and make choices for and not against love. Our Sunday school definitions will not work for us when the floodgates of wickedness are opened wide. We need to grasp the height, depth, midst, and breadth of the love of God, and choose the way of love even though everything in us may press us away from such a difficult path.
Understand that Moses was brought up in Pharaoh’s palace, with every comfort, every privilege, and every type of pleasure available at the snap of his fingers. The fact that he ventured out among the Israel slaves was unexplainable, completely out of the ordinary. And yet when he saw how they were oppressed and afflicted (“Moses…looked at their burdens”, v.2:11), he chose to do something about it rather than to retreat back to the comfort of his palace. Ex 2:11 says “Moses…went out to his brethren.” Beloved, once Moses saw them as brethren, not Hebrews, not slaves, not oppressed people, he was positioning himself to take action. We will never do with our hands more than we see with our eyes. In order to love as we are called to love, we are going to need to ask God’s help to open up our eyes.
Once our eyes are open, we still have to made right choices. It is very, very risky, so we have to be prepared. When we see crowds, we see inconvenience. When Jesus saw them, he saw a people harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. When he saw the sick, or those oppressed by the Devil, something moved at the very core of his being to bring healing and deliverance. The Bible never used the word sympathy as a description of an emotion of our Lord. Compassion feels not only FOR someone, it feels WITH and AS another.
That is why Moses “went out the second day” (Ex 2:13). He was no longer controlled by “wisdom”. It no longer mattered what others might say or do. The thought was no longer “what about tomorrow?” If Jesus had chosen to go into town to get some food after the long journey, or even to quietly rest by the well until they returned, no one would have given it a second thought. But Jesus, despite being “wearied from His journey”, had compassion on this pitiful woman who had one broken relationship after another. Paul later explained why Moses, or Jesus, or Mother Teresa, or Heidi Baker, acted in these radical ways. He wrote: “for the love of Christ compels us” (2 Cor 5:14). One who is under compulsion acts spontaneously and instinctively. There is an inner urge, a push, a lift.
We live in treacherous and shallow times. Friendship are casual to the point of being virtual. Commitments are made and broken willy-nilly. We love a sport’s team, a certain flavor of ice cream, and we love our mother and our spouse. If we look around us for a definition of love, we see a boat without a sail, a rudder, or an anchor. People are confused, and in that state of mind, in the face of unprecedented evil, Christians are being challenged to a higher place. Our hearts are being tested. Will we be made bitter, or better as evil increases? Will we retreat to our palaces as oppression and death abound around us? A standard is being raised throughout the earth for believers to be motivated by compassion, to see people as our brothers and sisters, to stir up the fire of God’s love in our hearts for the lost and the broken.
Excuse the cliches, but love is not sloppy agape. It is not passionate kisses, and it is not a dozen roses. Love is much more than a feeling. It sacrifices, it risks. It may involve words, but it must involve actions. The hearts of men will grow cold in our time. Our capacity to love will be stretched to the breaking point, when we will find no other way but to cry out to God for His love to take over and compel us from the inside. Persecutions will increase, and our enemies will begin to come out from among the shadows. Moses refused the label he had been given as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose the way of love. My love, your love is being tested in this hour. Choose love. Amen.