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What Does It Look Like to “Put On” Love?
What Will You Put On?
We’ve all had those mornings. Standing before an open closet somewhere between sleep and awake, trying to choose what to wear. The choice often depends on what your tasks are for the day ahead. An electrician, for example, dresses quite differently than an office professional. Clothing does more than cover our bodies; it prepares us for the purpose of the day.
When the apostle Paul instructs believers in Colossians 3:14 to “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,” he’s using an everyday metaphor to teach us something profound about the Christian life. Love isn’t merely an emotion we experience or even a principle to admire. In Paul’s language, love is like a garment that we must deliberately choose to put on each day.
This ordinary metaphor of clothing runs throughout Scripture’s description of our transformation as believers. Isaiah prophesied of One who would give us “a garment of praise instead of a faint spirit” (Isa. 61:3). Paul tells us we have “put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:9–10).
The Loveliest Place
Dustin Benge
The church—which was created by God, bought by Jesus, and empowered by the Holy Spirit—exists to be a reflection of God’s indescribable love. Learn to see beyond methodology and structure into the church’s eternal beauty with this theologically robust book.
Clothed with Love
But what is this love we’re meant to put on? Here we must be careful. Our modern context understands love primarily as emotion. Paul, however, is describing something altogether different.
The love he’s describing is first and fundamentally the love Christ has for his own people. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Before we could “put on” anything, we were clothed in the righteousness of Christ: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27, emphasis added).
The entire context of Colossians 3 declares this beautifully rich reality: “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). You are “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved” (Col. 3:12). This isn’t an aspiration of who we hope to be but a declaration of who we are in Christ.
When Paul instructs us to “put on love,” he’s not alluding to a bootstrap operation but a response of love with love. Consider how John describes this: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). The gospel embodies love in flesh and blood, then clothes us in the very life of the One who is love.
When we “put on love,” we aren’t merely personifying a feeling or exerting an emotion, we’re putting on Christ himself—“Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” (Rom. 13:14).
Getting Dressed
Since we are permanently clothed with the righteousness of Christ, who is love, what does it look like to “put on love” in the mundane reality of a Monday morning?
You don’t put on clothes once and consider yourself dressed for life. Jesus taught us to take up our cross “daily” (Luke 9:23). And so it is with love.
Putting on love is a daily conscious choice, often against the grain of our natural inclinations. Your spouse forgets to do something. Your child complains about dinner. A colleague takes credit for an idea you had at work. In each moment we’re faced with this question: “What will I wear in this situation?” Will I put on impatience, frustration, and retaliation? Or will I, by the power of the Holy Spirit, put on the love of Christ? Love that is “patient and kind” (1 Cor. 13:4–5). Love that forgives one another (Col. 3:13). Love that counts “others more significant” than myself (Phil. 2:3).
When we choose to daily clothe ourselves in love, we find ourselves being transformed from the inside out. The love we “put on” begins, by grace, to fit us more naturally. This is sanctification. As we “walk by the Spirit,” we bear “the fruit of the Spirit.” And what is the first in that list? “Love” (Gal. 5:16, 22).
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The Binding Thread
Paul says love “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col. 3:14). Like the one thread that could unravel the whole sweater, think of love as the thread that runs through every other virtue, holding them in their proper place.
Paul knew this well. In 1 Corinthians 13, he proclaims, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong . . . . And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge . . . but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1–2). When love runs through these virtues and becomes the garment worn over all others, everything is bound together “in perfect harmony.”
In your church, you’ll find a melting pot of lives that differ greatly from one another—different stories, different struggles, different wounds, and different expectations. But love is what holds the body of Christ together because it “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). It’s love that compels the bride of Christ to “speak the truth” so that we “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15).
In your marriage, you’ll face seasons of miscommunication, frustration, and even disappointment. Love—a deliberate daily putting-on of Christ-like love—is what binds you together as one. This is why Paul commands, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25).
In your own Christian walk, love for God is what holds your life together, even when the world around you seems to be falling apart. Jesus made this central when he commanded, “You shall 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” (Matt. 22:37–38).
Love is like a garment that we must deliberately choose to put on each day.
Perfect Harmony
How can we achieve “perfect harmony” in a world where love is so faltering?
Notice that it’s not our love that creates this perfect harmony that Paul speaks of. It’s the love of Christ in us. John reminds us: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us his Spirit” (1 John 4:13). We’re learning to reflect a love that is already perfect in its source.
The love we’re called to “put on” is not something we discover within ourselves. This love has been freely given to us. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5).
And here’s the beautiful mystery: as we wear this love, it begins to work in us what it has already accomplished for us. Paul instructs, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32). When we choose to put on love, we become more kind toward one another because we are increasingly aware of how kind God has been to us. When we choose to put on love, we become tenderhearted because our hearts are now softened by the mercy we have received. When we choose to put on love, we forgive more freely because we are constantly reminded of how much we have been forgiven.
The love that reconciled us to God now reforms our relationships, reorients our conversations, and reorders our affections. What Christ has done for us by his cross, the Spirit now works in us by his power.
Begin Again Tomorrow
Tomorrow morning, like 1,000 mornings before, you’ll stand before the closet again. And in that moment, you’ll have a choice to make. You can reach for old, stained garments of the flesh (Isa. 64:6). Or you can “put on love.”
As you think about what to choose, remember that you are hidden with Christ in God, that you are beloved, that “for our sake he make him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). And then, in the glorious power of that gospel reality, choose to wear love.
This is the life you were saved for. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7).
Put on love. Not once, but daily. Not perfectly, but persistently. And watch as the Holy Spirit binds your life together in a perfect harmonious reflection of Christ.
Dustin Benge is the author of The Loveliest Place: The Beauty and Glory of the Church
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