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Is My Love Overflowing and Abundant?

and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more
Philippians 1:9a

Church historian Tertullian in one of his writings titled, The Soul's Testimony shares the following incident. When the church started growing rapidly in the Roman Empire, the government sent spies into different congregations because they were afraid that this new group of citizens, these Christians, would be very disloyal to the Roman government. So one of the spies, went into a church came back and wrote this report.
"These Christians are very strange people. They speak of one by the name of Jesus who is absent, but whom they seem to be expecting at any time. And they love him like anything and also they love one another."
Tertullian writes in the article, "Interesting that an unbelieving spy in a Christian congregation made note of the fact that they loved one another so intensely."

Yesterday we saw that the main idea that flows through the prayer made by St. Paul's is love. He further states that they should grow in this love.Paul wants this love to be overflowing and abundant. The word abound means to exceed a fixed number of a fixed measure. If that's the meaning of the word abound then one thing is sure that the Philippians already loved one another. Paul felt their love, and Paul makes note of it in this letter.

What he prays for in this verse is that their love may abound. That is it may still grow more and more. In other words, that implies they already do it and Paul doesn't want them to do it less. He wants them to continue to do it, and to do it more.

Now that leaves us with a question. How do you increase something that's already overflowing? Eugene Peterson gives a beautiful illustration to explain this. Peterson says, "Its similar to turning on the hose in our lawn and walk away by letting it run." Peterson says this because he has made this mistake several times and thereby have inadvertently watered his neighbour's yards from time to time by trying to fill a little pond or water an area of his grass or a tree, and he forgot to close the tap. And when he realized an hour later its water everywhere.

Now, when Paul says, "I'm praying for your love to abound,"what is he specifically speaking about? Its possible that he is praying that their love would be the kind of love that goes out of the boundaries of loving just the church and loving different kinds of people in the world.

However, I believe that Paul is referring to the specific demonstration of love to one another within the church. I don't think he's speaking of loving God. I don't think he's speaking of loving God's world. I think he is specifically speaking of loving God's people, the church.

Now you might wonder why do I say so? Because he writes the same thing in 1 Thessalonians 3:12 - "may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all".

Now why is this important? I think its important because sometimes its easier to love people you never see than people you see every day. I am reminded of a cartoon strip Peanuts where the main character Charlie Brown says, "Oh I love the world, its just the people I can't stand." It's easy to say I love people I never see, but people you do see and work with and live with, its different.

Dear Friends let us ask this ourselves - Does our own love abound? Would that be a word that describes the expression of our love? Is our love toward our spouse an abounding love? Is our love toward our children, parents, among friends - is it abounding? Is it possible for us to say that word is the best description of our own love experience? Let us pray that our love be abound each day in the right manner.

God Bless You.

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Location: Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

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