The Grammar of Love

'Love is a verb, not a noun.' That was on a T-Shirt. What it stressed probably is to really love than talking about love.
However, in the Bible, just two verses apart from each other the word 'love' is used both as noun and verb. That is in 1 John 3:16-18. In the first case (in 1 John 3:16) it is a noun. 'By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.' The second occurrence is in 3:18, 'Little children, let us notlove in word or talk but in deed and in truth.'
Love cannot be just a verb. At the same time, unless love is quantified and displayed it cannot be a verb or an action. In fact, the act of loving comes from love. The reason for the exhortation in verse 18 is the direct result of the experience of love that verse 16 talks about.
Love is quantified as 'laying down our lives for others.' That is the breadth and depth of love. It can reach a point where a person loves another person to such an extent that his life is not more important than the life of the other. The life of the loved is more important than that of the lover.
That, however, seems to be humanly impossible.
Though it seems to be impossible, it was proved to be possible by Christ Jesus. He defined love by laying down his life for us. That is love as the noun.
Now, the verb is possible only if the noun is known through our experience. That is to say, Christ's love for us must be experienced in order to love others. Experience of any other form of love is certainly inadequate.

The Days of Antipas

"The days of Antipas" means not only a period of persecution but a period of perseverance as well. It signifies the days of believers who withstood the pressures from outside to surrender. In the church in the city of Pergamum, there were some people who remained faithful to Jesus in the days of severe persecution. Apostle John calls these days of persecution "the day of Antipas" (Rev. 2:13). The Antipas mentioned here should not be confused with Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas was a wicked ruler whom Jesus called "fox". He is the one who offered the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter to his daughter. He might have tried to kill Jesus and presided over Jesus' trial. However, the Antipas mentioned in Revelation 2 was the bishop of Pergamum, a pagan city in the first century AD. The name means "against all." There is a great con trast in the names -- Herod was against all that was good, however, Antipas th...

The Lonely Jungle Babbler

Every day it comes, and pecks at the glass panel of the window of my study. It is a Jungle Babbler, a very common bird in the Indian subcontinent. It dances flying up and down and fluttering its wings. Sometimes, three or four times a day it repeats this ritual. I thought it is trying to get into my room or fly through as it can see the other side. But why does it keep coming, can't it make out after three or four attempts that it can't fly through? I told my Neighbor, whom I consider an expert on birds, about this winged visitor. She explained that the babbler is pecking at its own reflection, thinking that it is another bird. I thought of verifying her suggestion. The following day I kept the window half open, drawing one panel fully open. The babbler came as usual. Perched on the window, looked into my room through the open panel but did not enter the room or peck. But it moved to the side of the window where there is glass and started pecking on the gl...

The Conquering Grace

Grace of God is hard to define. When I was making baby steps in Christian faith, mentors told me that ‘grace is unmerited favor.’ I found that helpful. But as I continued to experience God’s grace as I grew, I found that this definition is inadequate to express all that God does in my life. Now, I have come to realize that grace of God is such a thing that eludes any definition. Grace, as I understand now is what God alone and no human can do in our lives. It comes in various colors, shapes and sizes! John, the gospel writer seems to have understood the multifarious nature of grace that he talks about the ‘fullness of grace’ and ‘grace upon grace’ (John 1:17). Or the New Living Translation puts it: ‘From his abundance we have all received one gracious blessing after another.’ These expressions mean that grace is not just one-sided reality but a multi-faceted reality. Its fullness is beyond our comprehension just as God evades our understanding. One of the rare but ...

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