Having a different spirit for a different kingdom.
Matthew 24 is a challenge. There’s a lot going on in the passage – warnings, signs, the kind of language that makes you sit up – but buried in there is a challenge the church cannot afford to pass over. The challenge to be different, to read it, take it to heart, and be able to say hand on heart, “That’s not us.”
Matthew 24:12 lands with a bit of an alarm, a warning, and I wonder what the crowds thought of it, “And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold”. Was Jesus was slightly choked as He said that? He wasn’t speaking in double-speak or being ambiguous; He was intentional, clear, to the point.
He was speaking plainly about the spiritual climate that would mark the days ahead. Not the love of a few, not some fringe group – many. That should unsettle us. It means this cooling of the heart is not rare; it’s widespread. And the warning isn’t aimed at the world out there. It’s aimed at people who once burned with love but let it be smothered.
The danger is not that love is suddenly snatched away, but that it’s slowly starved. When lawlessness increases – when God’s ways are trampled underfoot, when justice is twisted, when truth is replaced with whatever serves the moment – it does something to the soul. We become suspicious. Self-protective. Measured in how much we give and to whom. Compassion gets weighed on the scales of “Do they deserve it?” And bit by bit, what was once the overflow of God’s love in us becomes a controlled trickle.
The motivation for us is that we are called to have the kind of “different spirit” that marked Caleb (Numbers 14:24). When the majority saw danger and shrank back, Caleb saw the same reality but clung to God’s promise. The love of many may grow cold, but we are not the many. Faith will always make you stand out in an age of fear, just as obedience will make you stand out in an age of lawlessness. Caleb’s difference was not in being braver by nature, but in trusting the Lord when others would not. And it is that same trust that will keep our hearts burning when the climate around us chills.
Here’s the challenge: not to let the climate of the age dictate the temperature of our hearts. When love grows cold around us, the easy thing is to match it. We guard ourselves, keep our circle tight, and talk about love more than we actually practise it, but Jesus didn’t call us to survive in a loveless world. He called us to stand out in one.
This is not about warm feelings toward the people we naturally like. It’s about costly love toward the people the world passes by – the poor, the lonely, the outcast, the inconvenient. Not as charity cases, but as family. Because that’s what they are if they belong to Christ, and it’s what they can become if they come to Him through our witness.
The early church didn’t just avoid letting love grow cold; they turned up the heat. In a culture that disdained and discarded the weak, they were different – they cared for the sick, fed the hungry, and welcomed the unwanted, not asking if they would be repaid or if it would be appreciated. They remembered the gospel. They remembered they were once far off, without hope, until God brought them near through the blood of Christ. And that memory kept them soft-hearted in a hard world.
If we forget who we were, we will forget how to love. But if we remember – really remember – that we were strangers made sons and daughters, enemies made friends, then love stops being a duty. It becomes a reflex.
The world’s love will keep growing cold. That’s the trajectory Jesus gave us. But that makes our calling more urgent. So we keep giving ourselves away. We care for the poor because our Father cared for us when we had nothing. We welcome the outsider because we were once outside. We bind up the broken because He bound us up. And when the story of this age is told, let it be said that in the days when the love of many grew cold, ours burned hotter than ever.