Love, love, love. Love, love, love. All you need is love… sang the Beatles on the 27 June 1967 to a televised crowd of over 400 million people. Yes, all we need is love. And the love we need is God’s love in us so that we can give His love away to others.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 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.… And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister (7-12, 21).
Love is not sex. Love is not lust. Love is sacrificially giving of our selves to others. Love defined by God is Jesus dying on the cross for people, people who followed Him and people who had Him killed. This is the love God is asking of us who follow Jesus. This kind of love is the costliest gift we can give to another human being. And we can only do this when we have been filled first by God’s love for us.
Contemplating this I have to think through how I live in every interaction of life. Do I love the other person with God’s kind of love? This is the question the text is asking of me as I sit with the Lord as the sun rises outside my window.
Do I love others as God has loved me?... Do you?
Think about it…
Oh, God, I fall short of your command to love, every day… probably most of every day. I guard self. I look out for #1. I turn a blind eye rather than turning my other cheek. As I think of Jesus hanging there for me, for us, I don’t come close to that kind of love. Please fill me anew with Your love so that I can give it away. Holy Spirit, show me when I am being selfish… so that I can change my ways and live more in line with Your command to love. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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