Most believers recognize 1Corinthians 13 as the Bible’s love chapter. This New Testament section enlightens us as to what God’s higher love looks like and acts like; it is a picture of God’s pure, perfect, unconditional love. Our human love is not unconditional because in our humanness we have preferences of what we like or dislike.
Are you in a struggle to keep on loving someone? Although it is easy to love sometimes, it can be a challenge to continue loving day in and day out. We all like and enjoy when love creates warm feelings that are pleasing to us. But when we don’t have warm feelings in our hearts towards someone – we must choose to sacrificially love for the greater good of God’s will. True sacrificial love cost, hurts, and it will empty you of self-making room for more oneness with Christ and continual filling of the Holy Spirit. If the Lord has called you to sacrificially love someone, for the sake of His plan, you must believe much more in the power of His love than in your weakness. It will be necessary for you to pour out your heart’s frustrations, fears, and the desire to run away from or to control the person you are struggling to sacrificially love, onto Lord Yahweh through prayer. As we release and surrender to the call, the Holy Spirit will give us the grace to release negative feelings, and teach us how to speak truth, set up healthy boundaries, and walk in the freedom and ability God’s love creates.
Jesus Christ is the perfected, beautiful, picture of God’s love. While walking on this earth, Jesus’ love crossed over boundaries of social customs, race, religion, and socio- economic divisions. The Yeshua of the Gospel teaches only love, compassion, forgiveness, and the Kingdom of God. The only people that Jesus Christ openly rebuked were the “holier than thou” religious who believed they had all knowledge and understanding of God. These unwise men sought to use religion to elevate themselves to places of power and control politics, people, and if needs be punish those who did not go along with their decrees. Jesus called them hypocrites; those who looked good outwardly, but inwardly their hearts were not spiritually alive and full of God’s love.
Jesus told his disciples, “I love each of you with the same love that the Father loves me. Let my love nourish your hearts. If you keep my commands, you will live in my love. My purpose for telling you these things is so that the joy that I experience will fill your hearts with overflowing gladness. So this is my command: Love each other deeply, as much as I have loved you. Love one another deeply”.
The Logos explains: God endures long and is patient and kind toward us; God bears up under anything and everything that enters our lives; God is ever ready to believe the best of us; He works all things together to bring healing into our lives, regardless of our circumstances; His love for us will continue; and He will be persistent to bring us toward enlightenment through our loving relationship with Jesus Christ. There is no condemnation in God’s love for His children-He longs to help us break unhealthy patterns, grow, heal, and transform into His likeness- gifting our inner man with relief and rest.
God will never fail us. It is His will for us to experience and walk in Truth and His powerful, overcoming, unconditional love, because He is Love! When we open our hearts to receive the love of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, a spiritual revolution will begin to take place within us. We will become God lovers through the help of the Holy Spirit- we will be able to forgive and love ourselves because He has- then this powerful, unconditional, spiritual love will be translated through our lives to others who are lost and broken and with a dire need to experience the Savior’s sacrificial, unending love.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and he who loves [his fellowman] is begotten (born) of God and is coming [progressively] to know and understand God [to perceive and recognize and get a better and clearer knowledge of Him]. He who does not love has not become acquainted with God [does not and never did know Him]. 1John 4:7-8
“Love endures long and is patient and kind; love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything. Love never fails” (1Corinthians 13: 4a, 7, 8b).
