Every day is a good time to talk about love, and to increase our efforts to love greater through the love of Christ. It’s one of the most important subjects in life because the truth is—life is all about relationships. The most that any of us can do is to impact the lives of others through the love of Christ. This makes their lives better, and it makes our lives better as well. Most of us recognize this. It’s why we desire and view good relationships with others as a gift to our lives. We have an innate desire to expand ourselves through cultivating relationships and deepening them. The mistake we make, however, is thinking this can happen without God’s love. It can’t. The love of God is the glue that holds all our relationships together, and we must learn to nurture them through the patience, compassion, generosity, and caring of Jesus Christ.
Whether or not we recognize it, this is the lesson God is teaching us this very moment. He’s teaching us what real love is and how we should be giving it in abundance. In society, we’re not groomed to think this way. Arrogance and selfishness are byproducts of the world, and sometimes we allow this to slip into our attitudes regarding the way we love. We get it into our heads that our brand of love, the love we’re giving to others each day, is just dandy. We don’t want it to increase, because increasing in love means that some aspect of our nature must change. There’s no doubt about it, real love will require us to continually go higher in Christ, because God’s goal is that we decrease in the flesh and increase in the Spirit. In other words, life is teaching us to love greater and higher than ourselves, and to do this, we must lean completely and totally on the Source of this unconditional and limitless love.
Parents don’t always teach their children to seek God to discover His purpose for their lives. Instead, we are groomed to think we can do and have anything in life that we desire. This is not the truth. We can have those things that are according to God’s Will and purpose for us. My 18-year-old mind was filled with aspirations. Quite frankly, some of the aspirations I had back then were beyond my scope of maturity and wisdom. They were built on fantasy because people told me I could be anything I wanted to be. As the responsibilities and requirements of adulthood grew, reality set in and became my disciplinarian. Disappointment showed up on the scene as well and did so without my permission.
God knows what is best for us, and I had to change in order to receive God’s best for my life. He’s the one with the plan, and it’s my delight and privilege to follow it. 2Peter 1:5-7(NLT) is God’s instruction, and it should be our aspiration for a life of His love and purpose. It tells us, “5 In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.” God commands us to respond to His promises. This practice will take an eternity to complete, and some of us haven’t even started yet.
Not only does He tell us what to do, but He goes on to tell us exactly how to get it done. He tells us to respond to the promises He’s made us by kicking our faith in Him in high gear, and we’re to do so with a generous portion of moral excellence. This means that before we make any decision or choice, we seriously need to ask ourselves if it will measure up to the standard of excellence in the love of Christ. If it doesn’t, we need to kick it to the curb.
Some of our past actions and decisions were not made with love, and this is just the truth. We acted without consulting the Lord, and we made a mess of things. The consequences of those actions are still tripping us up today, because we haven’t truly repented in our minds and hearts. If the same people we hurt years ago were in our lives today, some of us would still treat them the same way we did in the past. As a believer and child of the Most High, this can’t continue. Many of us are praying for God to usher newness into our lives, but we haven’t renewed our minds to His Word. If we haven’t renewed our minds to His Word regarding how we ought to love others, there’s no way we can produce a big enough landscape for abundance to land.
The bible teaches us that to whom much is given, much is required. We have such a loving Heavenly Father, and He doesn’t penalize us for not having the spiritual depth and strength that a blessing might require; He helps us. Through the indwelling Holy Spirit, God builds love capacity within us, which means that God helps us to increase in things like compassion, understanding, wisdom, patience and other spiritual goodies. These help to elevate our thoughts and confessions to equal the love of God that is anchored in our hearts.
When we come to know and accept God’s love, it will require us to redefine what we thought love was. The love of Christ is very different from the way most of us have defined love. Often, this is what keeps our blessings at bay. We are expecting to receive the kind of love that we have not disciplined ourselves to give out. That won’t work. All God’s blessings are contained within the person of Jesus Christ. The more we love according to the standards of his love and example, the more blessed we will be. Our very limited definition of love isn’t big enough to hold all that God has in store. His love is limitless. It’s infinite, and this is why He commands us to love others in the way that He does.
God’s love will never disappoint. We know from the Old Testament Book of Genesis, that God’s love creates. It produces things and makes them better. From this we can deduce that God’s love corrects and reproves. He instructs us in His Word to put on His kind of love, and this commandment ought to change the way we pray and what we pray for. It’s very important for us to know this, because you see, we have no problem asking God to give us spouses, more money, better relationships, health, healing, and material things, but we often fail to pray that He will transform us into the very image of His love. This kind of transformation should be our highest priority in life.
Every born-again Christian has the love of God inside them, because they have the spirit of Christ. But it’s a known fact that even though some of us have access to the greatest love available in all of eternity, many of us are not expressing this love in faith. Love is a commitment, and sometimes our commitment to love others despite their faults is not what it needs to be. God has given us the capacity to love others like Jesus Christ. Pray that He will open your eyes to the many opportunities He has placed in your everyday environment to express His love though your faith. When this is your priority, everything will change trajectories and begin to follow the greatness of God’s plan for your life. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Redefining Love” written by Reverend Fran Mack for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2022. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.