The Love Test
If there were a pop quiz about how well you love your neighbor, how would you score?
Contrary to that song made popular by Tina Turner in the 80's, love is not a secondhand emotion. Far from it. Love is the primary emotion that embodies and reflects our Lord in our lives. It’s how they will know we are Christians.
The apostle Paul described the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s no coincidence that love comes first on the list (Galatians 5:22–23). Paul also said that faith, hope and love remain, and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
We all know these things. But knowing what the Bible says about love and practicing it in everyday life aren’t always the same thing.
So let me ask you a question. If there were a pop quiz about how well you show love to other people, how do you think you’d score?
I’ll confess that I’m still a work in progress when it comes to Christian love, so I’m not presuming to hand out grades on the subject to anyone else. But there is one area of our lives that offers us a pretty good opportunity to score how we’re doing in the love department.
That area is found in how we listen and speak to each other.
Communication is the essence of human interaction and our relationships with others. Nearly every relationship is strengthened or weakened by the way we speak and the way we listen.
That makes communication one of the most frequent opportunities we have to practice Christian love. We may not have an opportunity every day to perform a great act of mercy or make a big difference in the world. But nearly every day, we speak to someone who would benefit from a little more love in their life.
So let’s have a closer look at three ways love does (and does not) act in the way we communicate with others.
Love listens.
There is an old adage that says the way God designed our heads shows us His intent for how we should communicate. He gave us one mouth and two ears. Love listens more than it speaks and when it speaks it chooses its words with care and compassion. Love listens patiently. It doesn't interrupt or change the subject. Love listens intently and is not easily distracted by dinging devices or things happening around the conversation.
Love is compassionate.
Love tries to be a caring friend rather than someone with all the answers. Love smiles understandingly, offers a gentle nod of acknowledgment and maintains eye contact. Love waits for the other person to finish their thought completely before responding. Love never hopes the other person will get to the point. Love doesn’t try to correct or admonish. Love never tries to change the subject to what we want to talk about. Love doesn't try to one-up the speaker with stories about our own, more interesting experience.
Love asks thoughtful questions.
Loving questions show the other person that we are supportive. Love never interrogates. Love gently encourages them to continue with what they are saying. Love asks how they feel about an experience they are relating. Love doesn't care what other people think about what the person is saying or what they have done. Love never asks judgmental questions. Love always offers people an easy way out of any question they are not ready to answer. Love asks, "How can I help?" or “What do you need?” in a way that others feel good about trusting us with their answer.
Now that we’ve considered several ways love can be expressed in an ordinary conversation, imagine that those concepts have been listed as questions on a quiz. Here are three examples of what those questions might look like:
“Did you patiently listen at least twice as much as you spoke?”
“Did you compassionately try to understand the other person?”
“Did you ask thoughtful questions?”
Think about the conversations you’ve had during the past week. Think especially about those that required more patience than usual. Now imagine that our pop quiz is multiple choice and offers these three possible answers:
“I did pretty well.” - (Score 5 points)
“I didn’t do very well.” - (Score 1 point)
“I don’t know.” - (Score 1 point)
If I answered honestly, I wouldn’t be showing off my 15 point score at my next small group meeting. I still catch myself thinking about my own “stuff” rather than giving my full attention to the other person.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the test is that our lowest scores may come from conversations with the people we love most. We’re often more patient with acquaintances than we are with the people who live in our homes or those close friends who know us best.
When Jesus was asked which commandment in the law was the greatest, this is how He answered:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Then He added, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37–40).
In Luke’s Gospel, an expert in the law gave the same answer when Jesus asked him what had been written about the commandments. Jesus told him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (Luke 10:25–28).
The man then asked, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answered with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37). The Samaritan noticed a wounded man beside the road. He stopped, considered what the man needed and responded with compassion.
That parable is about much more than communication, but it illustrates something that’s necessary in every loving relationship. The Samaritan paid attention to the needs of another person and responded with love.
The expert in the law wanted to know who qualified as his neighbor. Jesus showed him what it meant to act like one.
Our conversations are one of the places where we are given opportunities to love our neighbors.
Jesus never said it would be easy. Loving others can pose some of life’s greatest challenges. And knowing how we should communicate doesn’t mean we’ll always do it well. It can cause internal struggles.
Paul described that struggle in Romans 7:15: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
I know I should listen carefully. I know I should be patient and control my urges to respond. Yet old habits sometimes take over before I realize what I’m doing.
It’s easy to become frustrated when we find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over. But growth in Christian love rarely happens all at once.
That doesn’t mean we sit back and wait for better habits to form. It also shouldn’t mean that we fall back and adopt the popular mindset of “I don’t want to get involved.” We have to recognize the places where we fail and become willing to let the Holy Spirit teach us how to think differently.
If you’re like me, that means slowing down, paying attention and considering the effect my words will have before I say them. These may seem like small changes, but relationships are often built by small things done out of love.
Said another way, loving others means we have to be willing to do the work.
James asked, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?” (James 2:14).
His point was that faith becomes visible in the way we respond to the needs of others. It isn’t enough to believe that love is important. Our belief must eventually appear in the way we live.
The same is true of communication. We can agree that good Christians should be patient and compassionate, but the real evidence is found in the way we treat the person who’s trying to talk to us.
That brings us back to our imaginary quiz.
The real test isn’t given on paper or a screen. It takes place in kitchens, offices, church hallways and living rooms. It happens when someone needs more time than we’d planned to give or when listening requires us to set aside our own concerns for a few minutes. It’s in those moments that we become open to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
We may find that the Holy Spirit leads us to hold back what we are itching to say in the moment and instead say it to God in a heartfelt prayer, asking Him to shed His mercy and grace upon the life of another. Sometimes we show love not only by what we say, but by who we say it to.
If we really want to take a pop quiz about how well we love our neighbor, we don’t have to look very far to find the questions. It’s a test you take in the conversations you have every day.
The way you listen and respond will determine your score. When I look back at my scorecard over most of my life, all I can say is, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” But I have faith that He’s not finished with me yet. You should too.
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This is excellent. Before my husband and I got married, we took a pre-martial, Christian-based prep course with an older couple. It was so much fun! We took quizzes, learned how to listen and fight for our relationship instead of against each other. One suggestion that is great practice for active listening is to see if you can repeat to someone the general gist of what they just said. If you can’t, then you weren’t really listening, just hearing.
I haven't taken the test but I know my score would not be where it ought to be. This is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you so much.