Nurtured by Expressing Love
How then should we love one another? It’s not that we don’t know we are called to love, it’s that most had very little “love modeling” to follow. We simply weren’t taught or nurtured by love. It wasn’t expressed to us or worse the opposite was all we experienced, making the expressing or receiving of love a twisted distortion.
The Bible is clear and consistent about expressing God’s love. The word that Scripture uses most often for love when instructing us how we are to express love means: “to hold dear, to feel passionate toward, devotion or tenderness for; to feel affection or experience desire; to like or desire actively.”
I’ve used this distorted cop-out for not loving Biblically; “well God says we are to love each other, but we don’t have to like each other.” Not true! Not only are we to learn to like each other, but we are to develop passionate affection for one another. Jesus’ command is for us to learn how to express love; his way! Let’s look at the most concise passage on expressing love, his way.
“My beloved friends (wow, learning how to be a true friend is first), let us continue to love each other since love comes from God (He is the only source for us to be empowered to express love properly). Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God (we can’t express love apart from a genuine relationship with God). The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love-so you can’t know him if you don’t know love.
This is how God showed his love for us; God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about-not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God. (We simply cannot love without this deep work of cleansing and healing that comes only from the love he shows to us and sheds abroad in our hearts.)
My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deep within us, and his love becomes complete in us-perfect love. (God and his kind of love is seen as it is received and then expressed)…We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God, 1 John 4:7-12, 16, The Message, parentheses and emphasis mine.
I am being challenged to learn how to love directly from the source-Jesus! We are called to embrace it heart and soul, this love that only comes from him. As we daily experience the nurture that comes only from experiencing his love, we can begin to express that which we experience. Love like this is a non-negotiable issue in the Kingdom of God. My dear friend Alan says “our love must exceed our message.” Think on this; God’s love certainly exceeded his message. That is the essence of the new covenant!
In the grip of Papa’s undying, unconditional love and grace! Ron Ross
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