Love often flows from our natural affection for others. It brings us joy to bring goodness into their lives. And even when this is a sacrificial love, it requires little prompting on our parts to offer it. At other times, there’s no natural desire and we must choose to imitate love anyway. We’re not faking it; we’re simply putting into practice the good.
To be sure, we do not want our love to be inauthentic or fake – hypocritically pretending to care for others while our hearts are clearly detached from this truth. But authentic love doesn’t require us to feel loving either. And many times we simply play the part of love even as our natural feelings are still playing catch up.
Paul tells us to imitate him even as he imitates Christ. And this will regularly call us to discipline ourselves to love in ways we might not naturally do on our own. For instance, this might mean practicing forgiveness toward someone who has wronged us, being kind and patient with our kids when we’re at our wits end, or offering gestures of affection to our wife even when we’re not in the mood.
Whatever it looks like, we’re not being hypocrites in these moments, we’re simply participating in the process of being transformed – imitating Christ through our practice of love. This is a fundamental aspect of our spiritual formation and the key feature of our discipleship.
And while there is a sense in which we are acting, this is best seen as our way of learning to inhabit a new identity. We’re submitting to the training of godliness – practicing the good until we are formed by it and it simply becomes who we are. Faith stagnates and love grows cold when in the name of authenticity we wait to feel good before we do good.
In the end, play the part of love until it becomes who you are. It is not fake to practice the good, as this is how we imitate Christ.
