Loving God's Way

Of all the emotions God gifted us with, the most complex is love. For us it runs the gamut from “I love pizza” love to “I love my husband” love. It can be as shallow as loving a color or as deep and intense as a mother’s love for her children. We can feel patriotic fervor as a result of love of country and sentimental warmth for love of the holiday season. Love is complex and is expressed in a variety of ways by humans.

But how does God see love? Scripture says, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). His definition of love is given to us in the very life and death of Jesus. More than words from a Webster’s dictionary, he clearly demonstrates the meaning what love is all about. There is no ambiguity or confusion when you look at Jesus’ life among us and his death on the cross. God’s love revealed to humankind in the most radical way possible.

The passage from 1 John goes on to say, “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” God’s kind of love is exemplified in Jesus and that is the kind of love we are to show one another. The well-known verses from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a pictures love as Jesus lived it: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

And God’s love is strong. It does not waver in the face of adversity or pain. It is a constant. It doesn’t depend on our good days or bad, whether we’ve stumbled and failed or if we are doing just fantastic. In fact, it doesn’t depend on us at all. God’s love is wholly based on his heart’s desire to love us no matter what may come. He calls us to love the same, to set our hearts to love sacrificially just as he does.

There is a song from years ago that had a chorus line, “Love is not a feeling it is an act of your will.” There is truth to that, but I would add that God’s love is a fierce love. There is nothing passionless about it. There will always be times when to do the right thing in love may not be accompanied with great emotion or at least not joyfulness, but keep following the example of Jesus and don’t be surprised if passion eventually follows actions. The Bible says Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him (Hebrews 12:2).

I try to love God’s way, but I know I fall short too often. The good news is that the Holy Spirit resides in me and his presence produces the fruit of love. If I press onward and closer to God, if I continue to practice love in all I do, the fruit will grow. So it is for all God’s people: God’s love, for us and through us, reaching into the lives of the deserving and undeserving alike, touching lost, broken hearted, beaten down weary travelers in this life.

If we can love with God’s love, we can change lives, and not just the lives of others. We’ll find we ourselves are being transformed with every act of love. Dare to love with God’s kind of love and see what happens when you do. I promise you won’t be disappointed. 

Thoughts Matter

Right now I have an old Rolling Stones song stuck in my head. I frequently have songs get stuck in my head and drive me to distraction. They’re called earworms and they crawl inside my mind and take up residence sometimes and will not move out all day. Sometimes it can be a pleasant song or it can be a maddening commercial ditty. Either way, though, they can invade my thought life and make me miserable. But I do have ways of fighting back.

 Our thought life is important to God. What transpires inside our minds matters very much because what we think orders our steps. If I allow certain thoughts to go unchecked in my mind, I find myself being careless with my words. Thoughts that encourage feelings we should be rejecting put us on a path leading away from God’s presence. If I feel anger and begin meditating on it rather than dealing with it properly, I drive a wedge between God and myself and the person with whom I am angry and open up the real possibility of acting on the emotion because I have stirred it up by my thoughts.

 In Philippians 4:8, Paul writes, “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (NRSV) He went on to say that the God of peace would be with them. In other words, they would experience His presence as they practiced thinking this way. Scripture also encourages us to meditate on God’s word.

 In the Psalms, David exclaimed, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long…I have more understanding than all my teachers for your decrees are my meditation.” (119:97, 100) “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (119:105)

 We do well to corral our thoughts and remember God is Lord over them as well. We can’t always control what pops into our heads but we can replace those thoughts and deliberately choose to meditate on those things that please God and that will help lead to Godly living.