“since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints;”
The second area about which Paul gives thanks for the Colossians is their love.
“and of your love for all the saints”
Second, God worked love in them for each other. Despite differences and weaknesses, they loved each other.
Love is a corollary truth to faith (v. 4a). True faith produces love. It is easy to love the saints in heaven. They do not have a sin capacity. The difficult part of loving saints on earth is that they sin. We must love them, sin capacity, and all. We do not have the spiritual skill to dissect the old capacity from the new one. We must love the entire person and take them for what they are. This is the ear-mark, trademark, and hallmark that we belong to Jesus (Jn 13:34,35).
“Love” is in the present tense. Love is the outworking of faith (Co 1:4a; Gal. 5:6). Love is not self-centered or self-surrounded. Love purges us of our selfishness and gives us perspective in our relationships with others.
Love is the greatest characteristic of the Christian faith (1 Cor 13:13); the greatest commandment in the Christian faith (John 13:34,35); the greatest constraint in Christian faith (2 Cor 5:14); the greatest covering in the Christian faith (1 Pet 4:8).
Principle:
God expects us to love all the saints, not just the popular or pleasant ones.
Application:
We will do well to search our hearts to see if we love God’s people. The outstanding, tangible, visible, external evidence that we have faith in Christ is that we love all the saints on earth that we know. That means the ornery ones and the nice ones too. Some of us are right ornery. We can blame our parents or whoever we please, but some of us are just hard to please. We are hard to get along with. We are not as polite as we should be. We are not as thoughtful as we should be. Some non-christians have better manners than we do.
