Faith Words: True Love
Valentine's Day has come and gone. John and I don't usually make a big deal of this little holiday. We might buy candy and a small gift for the grandkids, but that's about it. But from what I hear on the news, lots of folks make a very big deal of Valentine's Day. They buy flowers, cards, candy, gifts, have romantic dinners, get engaged - all in the name of love. I don't think our world really knows what true love is anymore. There's so much self-centeredness and violence around us.
A young woman tells a reporter that she's killed a lot of people - so many that she stopped counting after 22 victims. In her latest killing spree, she and her new husband drove across the continent killing people along the way. I guess they were in love.
In the name of love, many in our country condone same-sex marriage. They ask how we can deny them a loving relationship. Twisted thinking has led them to believe that just because they call it marriage, it is marriage. I think the real goal is to degrade the loving relationship between a man and a woman that God designed. But still they call it love.
True love is not a feeling that we can put in an envelope, put a stamp on, and mail each February. It doesn't conspire with another person to do harm. It doesn't trade the truth for a lie.
True love doesn't live selfishly and blindly. I can't look at the sins and short-comings of other people without seeing my own reflecting back at me. Just recognizing the hypocrisy in others doesn't make me free of it. It's easy to see the counterfeit and shallow love the world prizes and forget that I'm just as guilty.
True love is a family gathered around their elderly mother as her body and strength fail her, comforting her and each other as they say goodbye. True love is a husband and wife standing by each other through decades of trials and triumphs. True love is a young mother caring for her newborn daughter, learning her cries and coos, teaching her older sister to spread the family's blanket of love around this new arrival. True love is a Father who chose not to leave us in our sorry and sinful condition but to rescue us with the blood of His one and only Son.
Between now and next Valentine's Day, look hard at the world around you. Try to see the people, not the evil. Recognize that in each of them is someone in need of true love from the Father and from you and me. Remember that our Father God really does love each of us. He loves those who are killed and those who kill. He loves those who live by His commands and those who break them regularly. And if we want real love - true love - we need to let Him into our hearts, receive His gift of love, and pass that love on unselfishly, without judgment to a people so in need of love that they'll create a holiday to try to capture true love in a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
With love,
Patrice
1 John 4:10-11 (NIV)
This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
A young woman tells a reporter that she's killed a lot of people - so many that she stopped counting after 22 victims. In her latest killing spree, she and her new husband drove across the continent killing people along the way. I guess they were in love.
In the name of love, many in our country condone same-sex marriage. They ask how we can deny them a loving relationship. Twisted thinking has led them to believe that just because they call it marriage, it is marriage. I think the real goal is to degrade the loving relationship between a man and a woman that God designed. But still they call it love.
True love is not a feeling that we can put in an envelope, put a stamp on, and mail each February. It doesn't conspire with another person to do harm. It doesn't trade the truth for a lie.
True love doesn't live selfishly and blindly. I can't look at the sins and short-comings of other people without seeing my own reflecting back at me. Just recognizing the hypocrisy in others doesn't make me free of it. It's easy to see the counterfeit and shallow love the world prizes and forget that I'm just as guilty.
True love is a family gathered around their elderly mother as her body and strength fail her, comforting her and each other as they say goodbye. True love is a husband and wife standing by each other through decades of trials and triumphs. True love is a young mother caring for her newborn daughter, learning her cries and coos, teaching her older sister to spread the family's blanket of love around this new arrival. True love is a Father who chose not to leave us in our sorry and sinful condition but to rescue us with the blood of His one and only Son.
Between now and next Valentine's Day, look hard at the world around you. Try to see the people, not the evil. Recognize that in each of them is someone in need of true love from the Father and from you and me. Remember that our Father God really does love each of us. He loves those who are killed and those who kill. He loves those who live by His commands and those who break them regularly. And if we want real love - true love - we need to let Him into our hearts, receive His gift of love, and pass that love on unselfishly, without judgment to a people so in need of love that they'll create a holiday to try to capture true love in a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
With love,
Patrice
1 John 4:10-11 (NIV)
This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Comments
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.
The Lord will fight for you;
you need only to be still.
Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me.
All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God's paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on Him the sins of us all.