When you think of Christianity, what are the first few words that pop into your mind? For me, love is one of them. The Bible is full of verses where God commands us to love, and the Gospel is all about Jesus dying for us because He loves us. I mean, you can’t ignore the message of love in the Bible! However, I feel like it isn’t talked about enough by a lot of Christians. We just like to say that we should always love everyone, and then move on. That is a great message, but it is so much more than that. In the last few months of my life, God has really opened my eyes to what love is: real, unconditional love. It requires selflessness and sacrifice at all times, even when you want to give up and stop.
Why do we love?
This question can be answered two very different ways. If you asked this to the world, you would get a very different answer than if you asked God. This is because wordly love is so different from Godly love. Worldly love is very limited: if you don’t meet somebody’s standards, or do what they want you to do, they will often stop loving you and will treat you with a surprising disrespect. I’ve seen it happen way too many times: it hurts a lot of people and it can be very confusing. The reason God’s love is so different is because His love is not based on emotions or feelings. Our human emotions come and go so quickly, and can often be unreliable. However, God’s love is steady and perfect: you can always trust it to be there, even when you feel unworthy of it. I can testify to how comforting it is to have something so unchanging and consistent when life is constantly changing and throwing new things at you.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God who he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:7-21)
The basic idea of this passage sums up the answer to my question pretty well: we love because God loved us first! However, it goes into so much more detail about the why and the how. When we demonstrate God’s love to the people around us, we are a constant light and a reminder that there is somebody greater than all of our struggles and our weaknesses. It is an opportunity for us to spread the Gospel through our actions, because if you love people the way God did, people will notice. Even if they don’t say something right away, they will notice how your reactions and decisions are not for your own gain. If you love everybody always, you can bring hope to those around you and make them wonder what filled you so much that you are overflowing with this love. How wonderful it would be for you to show love so much that people can see God in you!
Unconditional love
A few months ago, I went to a Biblical style wedding, and the message being shared was all about loving unconditionally. At the time, I felt confident, almost cocky, in my ability to love others. I thought that if I was just nice to people that it was enough, but wow was I wrong! For a while I had been struggling with being a light to people in my life that were frustrating me with their actions and their heart attitude. I got into the habit of giving out less and less love the more that they rejected it, until eventually I wasn’t really loving them at all. That day, I learned that God’s love is amazing because it is unconditional! For sixteen years now, He has continued to love me after all the times I’ve sinned and all the mistakes I’ve made. Nothing I ever did made God decide to stop loving me and leave me behind. If the Creator of the Universe was so faithful in loving me, why did I think I had any reason to stop loving people because they didn’t love me back?
Real love requires sacrifice: understanding that you are going to put them first, even if you know that you will never get anything in return. This was such a hard lesson to learn, because I spent months feeling like I was pouring into the cups of others when I only had a few drops left. Every day felt like I was on low, and I always made up the excuse that I had nothing left to give. However, if you love people like God does, He will give you the strength and the energy to continue loving those around you each and every day. It is a crazy thing, but I found that when I turned to God for guidance as I loved others, I was able to keep going, even if I was feeling neglected or ignored by the people that I was trying to love.
The other reason why love requires us to make sacrifices is because this is exactly what Jesus did when he died on the cross. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:12-13). When Jesus was on earth, he died on the cross to save a bunch of people who wanted him dead. After all the miracles and the changed lives, after all the love Jesus had shown the world, they still wanted him to be hung on the cross to die! If he still chose to die on the cross after everything they did to him, everything we did to him, it really shows how much he loves us. Jesus didn’t care what we did: he loved us so much that the only thing he wanted was for us to spend an eternity in heaven with him. Imagine if we loved so sacrificially!
Loving people requires sacrifice, but that doesn’t mean that we need to die for someone every day. Be focused on dying to yourself and putting others before you. This could mean giving up your day to help someone, or sending them a letter to let them know that you are proud of them. Even if you are tired, meeting up with someone for coffee to check in on them and be there for them is an amazing way to love, because you are putting your own needs aside for a minute to love others. Now, don’t pour from an empty cup, because I’ve already said that this leads to you feeling broken and idle. While you are loving others, make sure to be spending time with the God that loves you eternally, so that you are always filled with His strength in preparation to be a light for others.
I really hope you learned something from this post, or at least was reminded of a way you can be loving the people around you. I want to end with a commonly known passage about love that speaks volumes to me. Whenever it says the word “love”, put your name in there and see how it lines up. If you feel like you don’t meet one of these descriptions for love, I hope that it is on your heart to be asking God for wisdom in how to increase in that area. Enjoy!
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)
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