If we want to bring the message of the Bible to bear on the problems of the world around us, we need to realize that the Bible is much more radical than the agenda of either the right or the left. Love can never be equated with anyone's agenda because no agenda is love unless it comes from a certain kind of heart. We might be impressed with a person who gives a million dollars to build a hospital in Bangladesh, but God looks on the heart and queries the hidden motives of the soul. Christianity is not primarily an agenda for political activity, it is primarily a power that radically changes the human heart. Last week we saw in Gal.
Love is an essential part of the process of salvation.
It is not optional whether you love one another. Saving faith always gives rise to love and love gives evidence of genuine faith. The answer is that even though God is sovereign over his people and it is his Spirit that produces the fruit of love, nevertheless, God's means of doing his work includes human exhortation. There is no contradiction between saying God brings about love in our hearts and saying that one of the ways he does it is to remind us of love's importance with commands. Paul's attack on works of the law has not been an attack on commands but on the teaching that we should try to fulfill commands in our own strength to earn God's blessing.