A Legacy of Love

Have you ever experienced the moment of paying off a long-standing debt? Maybe you finally cleared a student loan after decades of chipping away at it. Perhaps it was a credit card balance or a car you knew deep down you probably should never have bought. Or maybe it was that final mortgage payment you once thought you’d never see.

How did you feel in that moment? Relief? Joy? Freedom?

In today’s Scripture reading, we’re reminded of two powerful truths about a different kind of debt, one that works very differently from the financial burdens we carry. First, Scripture teaches that every follower of Christ has a lifelong debt of love. Unlike our earthly debts, this one is never “paid off.” We don’t graduate from it. We don’t age out of it. There is never a moment when we retire from loving others the way Christ has loved us. In God’s kingdom, there is no scenario where we put in thirty faithful years of sacrificial love and then coast through the rest of life living only for ourselves. Our debt of love continues into tomorrow, into every season of our lives, and even into eternity, because it is rooted in what Christ has already done for us and will also continue to do for eternity.

The second truth is a reminder from Paul to the church in Galatia (and also to us) of how the freedom we have in Christ is never meant to fuel selfishness. True freedom is not found in indulging our flesh, but in humbly serving one another in love. Many people get this backward. They feel restricted by selflessness and liberated by selfishness. But Scripture flips that idea completely on its head. Self-indulgence eventually traps us and leads us to bondage, while agape love leads us to freedom. It covers a multitude of sins and frees us from bondage. We need to use our spiritual freedom for a purpose. Freedom in Christ is not freedom from love, but freedom for love.

This is the legacy God invites us to build, both as individual Christians, but also as the body of Christ. He calls us to a legacy of love. Every expression of it, every facet of it. This legacy is displayed and taught to the next generation, and they pick up the torch and live out each of the four loves to an even greater extent. This is what God desires, and what we have been called to.

There are many debts we want to escape from and especially not pass on to future generations, but the debt of love is not one of them. This is a debt we need to embody, teach, live out and unapologetically pass on to the next generation. But we need to always remember this…a legacy of love begins with you.