LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES
Read I Corinthians 13
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians. 13:13
To love and be loved is a basic driving force in life. Most of us believe that love is the most powerful force in the world. The Apostle Paul tells us that without love we have nothing. As such, people are always looking for love and hoping they find it. We’ve just celebrated Valentine’s Day, a day devoted to love, albeit romantic love rather than brotherly or charitable love.
We say “without love we are nothing “and “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. So where should we be looking for love and how will we recognize it? It’s a quest that has led people to many of the wrong places and the results can be disastrous. Many songs, books and court cases deal with lost love, forbidden love and unrequited love. Being in love with the idea of love isn’t any guarantee we will find love.
To find love, we need to go to the source of love, God, and his teachings about love. In 1 John, the Bible teaches us that “love is of God”, that “we must love one another”, and that “if you abide in love, you abide in God”. We love because God first loved us. Love is the rule for fulfilling all rules. In fact the great commandment God give us is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12 and Matthew 22). Man cannot love his neighbor unless he loves himself and he cannot truly love himself unless he loves God. What an amazing connectedness: love God, love yourself, love your neighbor. We love God because of his sacrificial love for us. It is only though his love that we are able to love. We need to love ourselves in spite of our shortcomings. Ask God to help you with your weaknesses, not overlook them. We need to love others in spite of their shortcomings. Ask God to help you look for the good in others, not focus on their weaknesses.
Love has some pretty amazing qualities: you have to give it away to get it back, it has no limits on its growth, it can’t be bought but it is more valuable than anything that can. The results of living loved are an abundant life and the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Ask God each day to help you be aware of his loving goodness and to be an agent of that loving goodness. Seek out opportunities to show his love and celebrate that love.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us the example of love in your Son. Guide us daily to seek your love and to give evidence of your love to others. May others know we are Christians by our love.
Pat Deck
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