Walk in Love — An Offering to God

On July 4 the reading was Ephesians 4, and the verse Le sat with was the last one: be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Ephesians 5:1–2 is the very next sentence. Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love. The chapter break is a printer's decision, not Paul's — he never stopped the thought.

Le asked this morning for Scriptures on walking in love, and the passage that answers it is the one she left off at five weeks ago. She did not go looking for that.

Paul does not say feel love, or have love, or even show love. He says walk.

A walk is a gait — a manner of going, taken step by step, mostly unremarkable, repeated all day without being thought about. Nobody walks in bursts. The word rules out love as an occasional event and installs it as a way of moving through ordinary hours.

And it is one of the load-bearing words of this letter. You once walked according to the course of this world (2:2). Good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (2:10). Walk worthy of the calling (4:1) — which Le read on July 4. No longer walk as the rest do (4:17). Walk in love (5:2). Walk as children of light (5:8). Walk circumspectly (5:15).

Paul spends the back half of Ephesians on one question: how does a person go about the day.

Be imitators of God as dear children. The qualifier is doing real work.

Small children imitate without being instructed to. Nobody sits a child down and assigns her the task of copying the way her mother holds a cup. It happens because she is near, and because she belongs to that house. Imitation is what proximity produces in someone who is loved.

Which is why the command is not as heavy as it first sounds. Paul is not asking anyone to manufacture a resemblance to God by effort. He is telling beloved children to do what beloved children already do. Yesterday's word from Smith was come near — and this is what nearness produces.

Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us.

That little word carries two things at once. It sets the pattern — this is the shape love takes, and the shape is self-giving. And it names the supply — the love being asked for is not being generated from scratch. It is being passed along by someone who received it first.

John says the same thing without the metaphor: we love Him because He first loved us. There is no first love in us. Every love a Christian walks in is second-hand, and that is not a defect. It is the whole arrangement. The vine feeds the branch; the branch does not manufacture sap.

Now the detail that changes how the whole verse reads. Christ gave Himself for us — and the same act is called an offering and a sacrifice to God.

Two directions in one gift. It went toward people and it went up to God simultaneously. The self-giving was horizontal in its effect and vertical in its presentation.

And the phrase Paul chooses to end on — a sweet-smelling aroma — is lifted straight out of Leviticus, where it describes an offering that has been accepted. It goes back further still, to Noah stepping out of the ark and building an altar: the Lord smelled a soothing aroma.

Which means love spent on people does not stay on the horizontal. It rises. The kindness given to a neighbour, the thing handed to a family who needed it, the patience extended when there was none left — Paul's language says those ascend, and that they are received the way an accepted sacrifice is received.

This is not a small comfort in a season where most of what love looks like is unglamorous and unwitnessed. The aroma is not noticed by the room. It is noticed upstairs.

John writes a sentence that appears to go in a circle, and the circle is deliberate. This is love — that we walk according to His commandments. And this is the commandment — that you should walk in it.

Love is defined as a walk; the walk is defined as love. John is refusing to let the two be separated. A love that does not walk is not the thing he is naming. And a walking that is not love has missed what the commandments were for.

Paul makes the same refusal from the other end. In Romans 14 the test case is astonishingly small — a matter of food — and Paul does not hesitate: if a brother is grieved by it, you are no longer walking in love. The walk is measured on the scale of very ordinary things.

Colossians calls love the bond of perfection — literally the ligament, the tie that holds a body together so that the parts work as one.

Which fits what has been read here for weeks. Living stones need something binding them or they are a heap. A body needs ligament or the head governs nothing. Paul says the binding agent is love — put on above all these things.

And Galatians is careful in a way English readers often miss: the fruit of the Spirit is — singular — love, joy, peace... Not nine fruits to be collected separately. One fruit, described from nine angles, and the first word is love.

Le quotes verse 16. The thing she describes is verse 15.

He who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. The word rendered judges means to examine, to sift, to assess. Paul is saying the spiritual mind can put the carnal mind under examination — and the carnal mind cannot return the favour. The traffic runs one direction only.

That is precisely what Le reports: standing a step above her own natural mind and being able, for the first time, to see what it actually was. She was describing verse 15 without knowing she was citing it.

And note what the sight produced. Not elevation — dismay. What she saw was her own mind, and the verdict was how bad and useless it was. A revelation that leaves a soul impressed with herself is a different kind of experience than this one.

Le insisted on the distinction: it's not rethinking things — it's actually having the mind of Christ. Paul closes that same door, and closes it harder.

Romans 8:7 — the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.

Not is not. Cannot be. Paul rules out reform as an option. Le called the carnal mind useless; Paul calls it unfixable. Which is exactly why the remedy could never have been better thoughts inside the old mind. The old mind is not a machine that has broken. It is a machine built to run the other way.

Hence the language everywhere else: put off the old man... be renewed in the spirit of your mind... put on the new man — Ephesians 4, which Le read five weeks ago, four verses before the passage in front of her this morning. Not repair. Replacement.

Le's last claim is the one worth sitting with: it's impossible to walk in love without the mind of Christ. It goes together.

Turn to Philippians 2:5. "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus" — and then Paul immediately tells us what that mind is. He made Himself of no reputation. He took the form of a servant. He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death.

Paul defines the mind of Christ as self-emptying love. Not as superior insight. Not as clearer reasoning. The content of that mind is the giving away of self.

Now set it beside the verse this entry began with. Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and gave Himself for us. Ephesians 5:2 and Philippians 2:5 are describing one thing from two sides — the walk, and the mind that produces the walk.

Le joined them yesterday from experience. Paul joined them in a single sentence. And it explains why the walk cannot be manufactured: a mind bent on preserving itself will never produce a life spent giving itself away. The gait follows the mind. Change the mind and the walking changes on its own.

Two days ago the reading was Paul's prayer that the eyes of your understanding be enlightened — a prayer, this journal noted at the time, for sight rather than for altered circumstances. The circumstances have not altered. Something was seen anyway.

And Le's closing line does what Liguori taught in July: I praise God for all the moving confusion, because through it all, this precious revelation was revealed. Not praise once the confusion lifts. Praise for the confusion, because of what came through it.

Liguori's word for this was exact — one "blessed be God" in adversity is worth more than a thousand acts of gratitude in prosperity. And this journal has said before that the protection is in the adversity, not from it. Here it is again, in a flat with a bed and a table left in it.