Choose Love

November 7 , 2024

In our culture, the word “love” can bring about a lot of confusion. What is love? Can you accidentally “fall in love?” How does love act?

Well, first, Love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. Even when you don’t feel like it, you have the ability to choose to do it anyway.

Acting in love when you don’t feel like it is actually a greater expression of love than when you do feel like it. Love is getting up in the middle of the night to help a sick kid after you’ve already had a long day and went to bed late. Love is being patient with your spouse when they’re irritable. Love is giving a person what they need, not what they deserve.

When you love in spite of your feelings, that’s called loving by faith. And it doesn’t just change the other person. It changes you, too, and makes you more like Jesus.

"Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7 NLT). 

Love is a skill. If you struggle to love well, here’s some good news: Love is learned! 

That means the more you practice, the better you will become at it. No matter how you’ve loved or been loved in the past, you can become amazing at loving others.

God wants to help you love people like he loves people. God’s Word and the Holy Spirit will teach and enable you to love others. You have to continually be filled up with his love in order to have enough love for everyone else around you. 

So, God will help you love others. But to become extraordinary at it, you need to practice it over and over again.

How do you do that? How do you practice loving people? 

God puts us in relationships with other people to practice. Marriage is a laboratory for learning to love. Family is a laboratory for learning to love.

This is one of the great reasons to be connected with a church family. You will have lots of opportunities to practice loving people, even people who are hard to love. And others will have an opportunity to practice loving you, even when you are being hard to love. In a church community, you’ll be able to practice forgiveness too. 

This is how we become more like Christ. Learning to love, forgive and extend grace to others. Extending grace and forgiveness to someone else might mean that they hurt you. Yep. But, it’s all part of the process as we become more and more like Jesus. 

In fact, living life isolated from others or only having surface-level relationships with people doesn’t make us more like Jesus. You can’t practice love and forgiveness in isolation. 

"By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)

Scripture tells us that the world will know we belong to God because of the love that we have for one another. That’s how they’ll be able to tell who is a Christ follower. By your love. 

Who can you be intentional about loving well this week?