Love as a Spiritual Gift

Not long ago I was asked to help lead a Monday night gathering. The focus that night was simple, the two things we come back to again and again: connecting with one another and sharing our prayer requests. As I thought about it beforehand, I kept returning to how good it feels when we meet like this, when we open up and share our lives together. We come to experience the gifts of the Spirit, of course. But there is something underneath all of it, an attitude, a presence in the room. Maybe it is the Spirit. Maybe it is love.

That word stayed with me, because of something I had heard only in recent months.

A new way to look at an old word

For most of my life I have understood love in two ways. Love is a command. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37-40). And love is a fruit. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace" (Galatians 5:22-23). A command to obey, a fruit that grows. That was the whole picture as I had always carried it.

Then I came across the idea that love might also be a gift of the Spirit. I will be honest, that framing was new to me, and it caught my attention. I do not want to overstate it. I asked ChatGPT to gather some support for the idea, and I did not spend a great deal of time with it. What it offered was that love, understood as a gift, energizes and shapes the other spiritual gifts, enables genuine service, and strengthens the impact of ministry. I bracketed that thought on the page I handed out and wrote next to it that this was simply one perspective. You may see it differently, and that is fine. I am holding it loosely myself, more as something to reflect on than something to settle.

What I can say is that there is a verse that keeps love and the Spirit close together. "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). Poured in. Given. Whatever else we say about love as fruit or command, that language has the feel of a gift we receive before it is anything we produce.

God moves first

The more I sat with this, the more I noticed that God has a way of giving before he asks.

Think of the Ten Commandments. It took me a long time to see this, until someone pointed it out, but the commandments do not actually begin with a command. Before a single "you shall" or "you shall not," God says, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exodus 20:1-3). Only after that does he say, "You shall have no other gods before me."

That order matters more than it might seem. He did not say, "Behave, and then I will rescue you." He had already rescued them. He took the initiative. He had already been good to them, and the commands came to a people he had first set free. I find that this is how love works in Scripture again and again. It comes to us before it asks anything of us. "We love because he first loved us" is the way one verse puts it, and even the new command Jesus gives carries that same shape: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34-35). The standard for our love is the love we have already received.

So if love really is a gift before it is a command, it changes how the command lands. We are not being told to manufacture something out of nothing. We are being asked to pass along what has already been poured into us.

When do we give thanks?

That same night, thinking about prayer requests, another thing struck me. We are quick to bring our concerns, and rightly so. But when do we make a point to give thanks?

Maybe at a Thanksgiving meal, when a family goes around the table and each person names something they are grateful for. Some families do that. But if I am honest, I tend to forget the blessings. I show up with the one concern, or maybe seven concerns, and I leave the thank-you unsaid. Yet if God has already moved first, if he has already been good, then thankfulness is not an extra. It is simply remembering what is already true.

I think love and gratitude belong together for exactly that reason. Both of them start by looking back at what God has already done. The love we are commanded to give is the love that was first given to us. The thanks we are slow to offer is owed for blessings already in hand.

Take it home and reflect

I do not want to tie a neat bow on any of this. Love as a command, love as a fruit, and perhaps love as a gift. I lean toward seeing all three together, though I hold the last one humbly and leave room for you to land somewhere else. The four passages that have kept me thinking are Romans 5:5, Galatians 5:22-23, John 13:34-35, and Matthew 22:37-40. They are worth taking home and sitting with.

Paul wrote a whole chapter on this, and I keep coming back to it: "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13:1). Whatever we conclude about the categories, that much is clear. Love is the thing that gives everything else its worth. And the good news, the part I keep returning to, is that we are not asked to start from empty. He loved us first. He poured it in. We get to live out of what we have already received.