Do you still love others well when their personality traits become unbearably irritating? When they fail to meet your expectations after you’ve explained again and again (“I’ve told you a million times …”)? When they don’t seem to care or get busy with other things more important than their relationship with you?
“Love comes from God … Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7,8).
The problem with those in my life who are hard to love isn’t them. It’s me. While I’m waiting for them to love me so much that it makes them easy to love, God is waiting for me to love him enough to trust his words. To take them to heart.
But by my lack of love I prove that I don’t really know and trust God for that. I trust myself and my feelings. I trust what I see the world’s godless crowds doing. And it shows in a lack of love, in fickle friendships and rocky relationships because I’m filled with a false love. It’s an incomplete love, not an unconditional love.
God doesn’t want your love to fail or be incomplete. He doesn’t want you craving and not being able to find the love you need, then despairing that you’re not loved. Like a father who wants the best for his children, so he’ll stay up late into the night fixing a skateboard, or he’ll spend his timed money on his family instead of himself—God wants the best for you so he sacrificed and gave up his ultimate love for you.
“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” (1 John 4:9,10).
The place where love is most powerful is not in the human heart, but on the cross where God sacrificed his own Son, Jesus Christ. God takes action to love you, with an eternal, selfless love expressed “among us” so that we can see it, touch it, and even in the sacrament of Holy Communion taste it. Jesus.
When it comes to God’s love, he doesn’t look for something good in you first, he looks for the good in himself, the love that he is, and he makes his choice. God loves you. Even you.
When it comes to your love for others, don’t look for something good in them first, look for God’s love for you. God’s love in you. Trust it. And choose to love.
“Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another … If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:11,12).
God’s complete love for you makes your love for others complete, because you believe in God’s love and act on God’s love.
PRAYER: I love you, God. I love Jesus, your Son, and know that you love me with all your love. Filled and forgiven by your love, empower me to trust your love enough to love others unconditionally. Amen.
REACH A FRIEND: Share this with family or a friend you need to love in better ways.