The past couple months God has been teaching me a lot about love. As you might imagine traveling the world, living with the same 8 people, engaging in different cultures and ministries for 9 months creates a lot of opportunities to step into, struggle with, and grow in loving others. Love is tricky, it’s vulnerable, it’s scary, it’s beautiful, but above all it’s incredibly important and necessary. We know the value of love because of what Jesus said about it. When asked, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is similar: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Matthew 22:36-39. According to Jesus we are instructed to do two things: love God and love others.
1 John 4:11-12 expands upon the importance of loving others. “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” Therefore we are not only called to love others, but we are called to love people in a way that reflects God’s love.
Finally Peter gives the instructions to, “above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” 1 Peter 4:8. In other translations it describes this type of love as “being fervent in your love for one another”(NLT), “love each other as if your life depended on it”(MSG), and “constantly echo God’s intense love for one another”(TPT). This is not a surface level type of love. This is not a short term type of love. This is not a conditional type of love. It is a love that is deep, enduring, and unconditional. And frankly it is a love that I think has become rare in our world today, which is all the more reason to be intentional about being a reflection of God’s love.
But the thing is, we can only reflect God’s love to others if we ourselves have a true understanding of God’s love for us. Paul’s prayer in Ephesians shows our need for a greater understanding and revelation of God’s love. He says, “…And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:17-19. So we see that God’s love for His children “surpasses knowledge”. It is incomprehensible. This reveals the exciting truth that we get to spend the entirety of our lives here on Earth learning more and more about how deeply and unconditionally God loves us. Just because we will never fully comprehend the extent of God’s love doesn’t mean that we can’t continuously grow in our understanding of it. The more we understand how much God loves us, the better we can love others in a similar way.
In 1 Corinthians we get to see some of the characteristics of a love that reflects the Father’s. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. This is how God loves us and how we are called to love others as well. To be honest many times I look at this passage and become discouraged because I know how hard it is to love this way and how often I fail to do so. I know that in my own strength I cannot love in this perfect way. The good news is that we don’t have to! When we are filled with the Holy Spirit we don’t have to rely on our own limited ability to love. Galatians 5:22 lists the fruits of the spirit, the first of which is love. God has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit within us to be able to help us to look more like Him. My prayer these days is to continue to grow in my understanding of God’s incredible love and to be able to love others in a way that is reflective of that love through the help and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Blessings,
B🤍
