Our own personal love is not as good as the love of Christ

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 07, 2025

This is the conclusion of a four-part series which explores various aspects of how we draw others to God, Jesus Christ, and the Church He founded. In the first part I indicated the importance of apologetical arguments (that is, the rational defense of the faith) while indicating that apologetics alone is not enough. In the second I discussed those factors or “motives of credibility” that attract people to the the Faith. And in the third, I stressed the tremendous importance of the family as the ultimate incubator for deep, interior conversion. But clearly the vast majority of persons throughout the world have not had or do not have a strong Catholic family life, or indeed any Catholic family life at all.

What, then, is left? The answer is actually the very thing that is both modelled by a fully Christian family life and inescapably attracts positive attention. In other words the answer is Catholic peace, joy and love.

We know that this is the answer because the fundamental motive power of conversion is really God’s love for each one of us. It is precisely because God loves us that we are drawn to wholeness through an effort to return that incomparable love. But for those of us who recognize this reality—this stupendous fact that God loved us first—it becomes a mission not only to love God in return but to image God by loving others first, that is, before they love us. We might describe these relationships of love as “the reciprocity of self-giving”, a reciprocity brought to fullness when the lover and the beloved is God. But however we articulate it, the hallmarks of this love are an unconquerable peace and joy.

Unfortunately, the problem we all share is our tendency to ignore or reject God’s love because it seems to interfere with our own momentary priorities. Even the saints have done this at times along their path to holiness, through their own temporary selfishness and perversity; indeed, the way of holiness is marked by a recognition of these failures. Nonetheless, love remains the ultimate cure for that self-closure, that turning inward, which we all so frequently substitute for the glorious adventure of knowing and serving God.

Joy: The adventure of love

The primary human problem is that despite God’s astoundingly generous plan of salvation, we are all prone to put what we see as our immediate particular problems or desires ahead of the deeper quest to understand why we remain both so restless and so wayward. But the only thing that stills that restlessness and waywardness long enough to provide a positive orientation to our lives is the love of God as it is typically manifested through those who have already sought to draw close to Him.

This, of course, is why the life of the Christian family is the greatest school of love, as I indicated in the previous installment. But it is also why it is so hard for genuine love to reach us in this busy and broken world, by which we are constantly distracted or harmed or driven off course. Huge numbers of people are either lost or complacent. The vast majority are almost certainly afflicted by both conditions. These are, indeed, the two most common aspects of our alienation from love and from the Author of Love. But in a very practical sense, what penetrates that alienation will most often be the willingness of believers to radiate goodness to others in spite of their own rejection and suffering.

This is why proselytism is so harmful, by which I mean the effort to draw people into our circle of faith or church primarily for our own benefit, or for social or economic benefits, or as trophies of our own supposed apostolic zeal. For insofar as we attract others for the sake of any form of worldly gain or for our own greatness and glory, we do them no service at all. St. Paul explained this very carefully in his first letter to the Church in Corinth:

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. [1 Cor 2:1-5]

Instead, Paul said, “We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God…. ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.’” [vv. 7-9]

Living water

We Catholics are not in the prosperity business but the joy business—or, if it were not too easy to misunderstand, we might say the “love business”. Our essential mission is to reflect the astonishing peace and joy which comes through our understanding that God loves us to the point of sacrificing Himself to draw us to Himself. Our unconquerable joy, regardless of our circumstances, a joy which overflows into the lives of others through our care and concern for them, is our ultimate witness to the Presence of God. When we give others an opportunity to experience that joy through our friendship and whatever service is needed, they will (if they are open) be intrigued by it, they will experience a kind of peace through it, they will welcome our company, and they will wish to know the source of our unmistakable joy.

Why are we not shaken by our trials as others are shaken? Why is it so hard to upset us? Why do we always have something more to give? Why do we continually offer assistance rather than condemnation? It is as if others thirst terribly, but we do not. Will it not seem to them that we have some secret access to a “living water”?

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water…. Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. [Jn 4:10-14]

My point here is that our joy and its cause must not be overshadowed by mere natural or material service, for the source of our greatest gifts is not natural or material. Material service is a response to a need, but human need is always deeper than its materiality. In this sense, it is a grave error to dismiss genuine Christian witness—which ought to be characterized by an overflowing gratuitousness or generosity—as mere proselytism. Indeed, given the cultural unpopularity of the Christian message in our time, the opportunities for mere proselytism—the selfish acquisition of spiritual groupies—are very few and far between. We must not use the fear of proselytism as an excuse for our refusal to witness to Christ and His Church!

Witness to Christ

The far greater danger today is that false and essentially cowardly warnings against proselytism will become an excuse to avoid mentioning Jesus Christ. To be clear, joy is not proselytism, witness is not proselytism, proclaiming the truth is not proselytism! We must always distill our Christian “water”, removing from it the impurities we have introduced, so that others may taste through us that pure living water that is the very love of God. But the greater likelihood is not that we will draw others to Christ for personal glory or gain but that we will fear to include Jesus Christ in every service we perform. Christ’s Presence is found in prayerful attentiveness to the needs of others, but it must be an attentiveness marked at once by our own joy and our own overflowing witness—both implicit and explicit—to the goodness of God, and to God’s own thirst for our salvation through Jesus Christ.

“What father among you,” asks Jesus Christ, “if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” [Lk 11:11-13] If God is to work through us, then, we are called to be conduits of the Holy Spirit, witnesses to Christ not only to the very ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) but in our everyday life. Christian kindness must radiate Christ. We may wish to share our own love with others, but we are not called to share our own love except insofar as our love is Christ’s love, and our service is His service.

The paradoxical reality is that we actually want the world not to make sense to people without Christ. We want people to feel confused and unhappy and trapped in a world without Christ. These distressing situations are actually the predictable results of our fallen condition. This is what it means to experience reality without a savior. But the Christian’s role is to affirm to those who are troubled and confused that, while their situation is predictable, it is not final, it is not ultimate, and in fact it is missing the most important factor. They are not nothing; their lives do make sense. But they make perfect sense only through identification with Jesus Christ.

In this chosen identity lies the ultimate charity. In this life of grace lies a life-saving witness. Delicacy and respect are always virtues. But it is Christ who matters in all this, and we must never think that our own purely human love is just as good as His.

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Previous in series: Family life: The ultimate school of faith and holiness