Love

My Lesson for Today:
Give everything
Expect nothing
Let forgiveness know no bounds


In the Bible I read that if I don’t love the Body of Christ I cannot say I love Christ. It sounds so easy, this loving the Church.
It is easy until there is a breach in relationship with one person and I find it easier to withdraw my heart than to willingly sacrifice it on the altar of forgiveness.

1John 2:7-11
“ Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment—to love one another—is the same message you heard before.
Yet it is also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you also are living it. For the darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining.
If anyone claims, "I am living in the light," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is still living in darkness.
Anyone who loves another brother or sister is living in the light and does not cause others to stumble.
But anyone who hates another brother or sister is still living and walking in darkness. Such a person does not know the way to go, having been blinded by the darkness."

If I love part of the Body, I have to love the whole and not exclude any member. If I love the whole that must be unfailingly else it is not really love at all because “love never fails”.

Who am I to withhold my love? Was it ever mine to monopolize? Did I originate it? Is my love not just borrowed from the One who loved me first? How selfish I am to grasp the gift of God so tightly in my fists! How ignorant I am to refuse to share it as He commanded.

To love is never easy…see, the thing about love is that it must consume. The thing that fuels love is the offering of my selfish desires to be burned. Love and selfishness are a sorry pair – they can never coexist. Love will always be determined to consume the selfishness and selfishness always desires to quench the fire of love. Love, true love, requires me to die that God might live His love through me.