THE SOURCE OF TRUE LOVE

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

We love because He first loved us.

1 John 4:19

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

We all want to be loved. Deep inside, every single person wants to feel the warmth of someone’s caring and compassion.

Unfortunately, real, genuine love can be hard to find in our world and that’s a big problem that leaves multitudes feeling hurt and alone. In fact, perhaps there aren’t many worse places to be in life than in a place where you feel unloved.

So why do we have such a shortage of legitimately loving people?

I believe there are two reasons and one leads into the other.

First, every single person is imperfect. No matter how good you think you are, the truth of the matter is that you are flawed in almost every way and that includes the way you love others. Left to our own devices, we are doomed to fail the love test and unfortunately do so regularly if we’re honest with ourselves.

And so with this, we need help if we’re going to hope to love in ways that others will value, love that is legit, authentic, and effective. Thankfully, we find the help we need in today’s scripture verse, a mere six words that, if embraced, will help us fix our love problem. Look again at those words here:

We love because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19

In a previous message, we looked at three other important words on this subject in the sixteenth verse of this chapter. Those three words stated this absolute truth:

God is love.

When we put these two verses together, we understand that the source of all love isn’t found in any human person but rather in the divine, holiness of the Lord God Almighty. He is love and the only way we will love anyone properly is if we first love Him as He loves us and then share His love with others. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus reinforced this through His own words, borrowing from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. Here’s what He said:

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

In these two verses, Jesus provides the way to tap into the only source of true love and as we see, we have to give to God to receive what we need from Him.

Step one in the two step loving process is giving all of our love to God first.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

As created people, we are to give our complete devotion to the Creator, our God who made the heavens and the earth and everything within them. We’re to love Him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, pouring out our love in Him and when we do, something amazing happens.

His love becomes ours.

Indeed, we can’t love others the way He intends unless we love the way He does. And the scripture verse for today is clear and bears repeating.

We love because He first loved us.

It all starts with God and the source of true love, a true love that allows us to really love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Are you loving that way today? Are you loving God with all you are so His perfect love can then flow through you to those He brings into your life, those that He longs to feel the way He cares for them?

If not, I pray this message will provide what you need to love better because you will have traded in your imperfect love for the perfect love found in our perfect God. For if you do, then these three words from 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 8 will come alive in your life.

Love never fails. 

It never fails because He never does. 

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.