Learning to love like God

Do you remember when you were in school and you were tardy for class, or you forgot your homework, or you were talking when the Teacher was talking? If you were caught, you might be punished by having to write one hundred or more standards to correct your conduct.  Part of your conduct correction was the pain you felt in your fingers at the end of writing all that, but it would cause you to think twice before you did it again. Well, what if you had to write one hundred times, ‘God loves me.’ Do you think this would help you to understand God’s love for you? Probably not, but what if you had to write it one hundred times and then add the reason why He loves you, would that make a difference in understanding His love? Got you thinking huh? Seeing it in writing would give you the time to think on the things God has done in your life to show you His love, but more importantly, it would let you see just how much you show love for Him, His people, and His creation, or lack thereof.

Of course God’s love is completely different from our love for anyone (1 Corinthians 13:4-8 NLT). As human beings we put a whole lot of conditions on the way we love. We pick and choose who we want to love. We love you sometimes and hate you sometimes. We love what you can do for us but think twice if you can’t do it. We love you according to how we feel about you and talk about you when we don’t like how you feel about us. We love someone for all the wrong reasons, and hate for all the reasons we should love them. We truly do not have this love thing together at all, but true love, God’s love, is unconditional. His is a love you can believe in (1 John 4:9-10 NLT).

 Truth be told we really don’t know how to love God’s way at all, we’re not wired to love anybody that much, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). You see, God loves us to death. He allowed His only Son, Jesus Christ to die to save the world from sin and death. That’s true and unconditional love, can you do that? I’m guessing no. No one can. Even if you told someone, “I love you so much, I would die for you,” that love is not the same love as God’s love for mankind. No earthly promise of love can compare to God’s love for His most prized creation, human beings. We show our love for God by trusting and obeying Him. We love Him by being kind to others, doing good deeds for others, being obedient to His word, and believing in His Son and what He did for us on the Cross (John 14:15 & 21 NLT). 

Love, have you ever thought of what that word really means to you? We all want to be loved, it’s the reason we exist. We look for love in people, places, and things. We want our parents to love us, our friends, our families, and we expect exciting sexually explosive love from our lovers, but here’s the thing. We are loved, God loves us in every way we have the possible capacity to think of, but we don’t believe it, so we continue looking in our own human ability with no satisfying results. Jesus said, “The world’s sin is that it refuses to believe in Me (John 16:9 NLT).”  How do you expect to experience true love if you don’t know and understand the love you already have available to you? God is love, disbelief in that truth is sin, and sin will keep you from experiencing God’s love for you. This is the cycle of love that many Christians don’t believe, if we did, love would abide in the hearts of all Believers, no let me change that, love would be active in the hearts of the Believer, because love is in our hearts, we just don’t give it to everyone. God knows, He knows the heart of the Believer. He has given us His love to be the example of love for others, but if we don’t know the love of God in us how do we show it to the world?

In Bible times love was shown in several ways three of which I will talk about in this chapter. First there is the kind of love God has for us, agape, listen to it as it rolls off your tongue, agape, it even sounds loving, doesn’t it? Agape, God’s love for us is an unconditional love. It means despite who we are, what we do, what we say, what color we are, where we live, or what our situations and circumstances may be, no matter what, God loves us through it all. Can you say that you love like that? His love is never failing, never unfaithful, never abandoning, and never conditional, it’s just real love. We know what real love is because Jesus gave up His life for us (1 John 3:16 NLT). Agape love is self-sacrificing, it is spiritual; it is the essence of who God is in nature and character, because He is love (1 John 4:8). God’s love is the expression of His being God. He loves the unloved, the unlovable, and the love undeserved. He loves more compassionately than worldly or heavenly love ever could (Ephesians 3:18 NLT). There is no love greater and this not because He has to love us, but because love is who He is.

His love unlike ours is not based on a feeling or driven by an emotion. Sacrificial love is an act of the will, it is the need to put others before ourselves, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39 NLT).’ Agape love is the true source of God’s love and it can come from no one other than Him. However, He has poured this love into us by His Holy Spirit that dwells in us; it is gifted to us as part of the fruit of the spirit which we receive when we become His child (Galatians 5:22-23 NLT). We have to learn how to tap into the power of this love by giving the Holy Spirit free range with our hearts.  Agape is a selfless love, a forgiving love, a divine love, and a love we can never repay. Again I say, “This kind of love can come from no one other than God.”

The second love we see in the Bible is Philos; it is a mental kind of love, tender, affectionate, or giving love. It is a love shared between family, friends, and love ones. It is the love the disciples had for Jesus. It is what we feel for others, our emotional connection to the heart. It is a genuine concern for others in a way that helps or heals them or relieves them of sorrow. It is being concerned for someone else’s welfare. It is a comforting love, a trusting love, an understanding love, it’s a love that grows from one day to the next depending on the time and effort you put into it. It is a love that is give and take and not one sided. It’s an affectionate love that gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling when you have been kind or done a good deed for someone. Philos is a learned love that begins at birth and is developed over time as we grow into adults. We use that same learning technique as we develop in our relationships with others (John 13:34-35 NLT). This is a continually progressing love that grows as you begin to understand the love God requires of us for others.

The third kind of love we see is Eros; this is a physical love for one another. An erotic love experienced when feeling aroused in an intimate relationship with the opposite sex. This love can be called a love based in self-benefits, ‘I love you because it feels good to me.’ It can sometimes be a selfish love in that it can be self-centered, self-gratifying, and self-desired depending on the state of mind of the person pursuing the relationship. It was common among the Temple prostitutes in the Old Testament times even though it was forbidden by God (Deuteronomy 23:17-18 NLT). This love has grossly saturated our world today, because society has accepted it as common place or as a general sentiment to loving someone. This love was to be a symbol of the unification of godly marriage; it is the consummation of bringing together the physical bodies of a man and a woman in oneness with each other for the continued production of creation. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it (Genesis 1:28a NLT).” This love can best be seen in the way God created it in the book of ‘Song of Songs,’ the expression of true physical love between a man and a woman as God intended. Today this love has been misguided, distorted, degraded, and exploited beyond anything God produced it to be. It can sometime be downright shameful instead of loving, used horribly against God’s perspective of love.

“How do I love thee, let me count the ways.”  In the Bible God has shown us three ways in which to love others. Why is it then that we have to create several other ways? We want to know how you love me… why do you love me… how much do you love me… are you going to love me forever… will you love me no matter what happens…or if you love me then…. God showed His love for us by sending His Son to die for us. That should be the only reason you need to love anyone.  We have to allow our roots to grow down into God’s love where we are made strong (Ephesians 3:17 NLT).

God gave us two commandments that cover how and why we are to love (Matthew 22:37-40 NLT). The latter part, verse forty means that everything in the Law of Moses and everything the prophets spoke are summed up in love. If we love like God commands the world would be a better place. I’ve heard many people say, “You can’t love everybody” or “some people don’t deserve to be loved” or “loving people is too hard.” It is not up to you to make that decision. What if Jesus felt like that when He was on the way to the cross, where would we all be now? Paul said God expects us to truly love others (Romans 12:9-10 NLT). God commanded it, so we have to do it. Growing in the love of God helps us to understand and gain wisdom in learning how to love others God’s way. Understanding this will help you: R-E-S-P-E-C-T others, that’s right, respect others. If you can learn to respect others for who they are you will be less likely to judge them, and non-judgment leads to acceptance, and acceptance leads to love. If you can find it in your heart to accept people like they are with all their faults, hang-ups, negatives, beliefs, choices, decisions, races, living and life styles, handicaps, stereo- types, and stigmas we would be fulfilling God’s command to love everyone. Loving God’s way is not hard when we stop looking at love through the eyes of man and start loving with the heart of God. When I began to experience the love of God, I closed my eyes and pictured Jesus on the cross. I could see Him clearly with tears in His eyes, pain in His expression, flesh escaping His wounds, blood dripping down His face, hands, and feet, I knew then that he loved me with all of Him. Well that says it all, doesn’t it? That’s God’s love.

Did you know that love is an action word? You have to learn to love, that’s an action. You have to give love, that’s an action. Saying, “I love you to someone is an action. Showing expressions of love, like giving candy, gifts, or flowers to others are actions. Jesus hung on the cross to show His love for us, that’s an action. We love to tell people, “actions speak louder than words,” yet most of us don’t show the love of God for others in the actions of our daily lives. We laugh at them, we lie to them and about them, we cheat on them, hit them, steal from them, cuss at them, ignore them, kick them when their down, turn our backs on them, kill them, and reject them. Where is the love of God in the actions of His people today? Your obligation to God is to love one another, period.