Love Is . . .

It’s not normal. Seriously, it’s not natural to love someone who doesn't love you. It's not natural to give your very best when you could get by with a lot less. It's not natural to love someone who doesn't care. And it is not natural to give everything when there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive anything in return.

Understand this . . . it’s not natural, it’s supernatural. It’s the best that we can get. God loves us. How do we respond? What do we do with it? What difference does that make in our lives? Do we just take it for granted and know we’ve got a piece of heaven? Or do we become passionate and love God back!

In fact, as I was writing this I wondered if we could sincerely, honestly say “God, dear precious God, I love you! I love you! I love you!”

Could we say that and mean it? And if we do, then are you showing it to Him by your actions and attitudes?

One day a scribe asked Jesus, “which commandment is the most important of all?”

Jesus replied - -

30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12

This means we love God with everything we have. God is love, God has loved us with His words and His actions. Now we give love back to God and we love Him with our entire being. We love God with our heart / our emotions, our spirit / our soul, our mind / our intellect, and with our strength / our body. That covers who we are. We give God not some, but all of our love.

Then we go and we love others as well. We do the same for others, showing God’s love to them.

Loving others means loving them "as is." It means loving the rotten apples, the lemons, the stalks of celery. It means loving them even if they hate us. It means loving them not because they give us something or can do something for us, but because God is love and has loved us.

We now have the opportunity to love like God. We can be God to the world. We show the fullness of God in us. And that has the opportunity to change the world in the name of Jesus.

We read in 1 John 4:12 - - -

12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. - 1 John 4:12

What’s really cool about this statement is the fact that no has ever seen God, but the way people can see God and experience God comes when they see the love of God in us. They see it in the way we love others, in the way we do our jobs, in the way we treat people. They see it in our character. They see it in our social media posts. There’s so many ways to show who Jesus is when we live our lives for Him.

Maybe this will make sense . . . at Christmas time we put up all of those lights on a wire. You know, 100 lights on one wire. From what I understand, the electricity comes into the wire then goes into the first bulb, and through the bulb and its filament and then back into the line on to the next bulb and so on. As it flows, not only into each of those lights but out of each of those lights, then the entire circuit is completed and the string of lights is bright.