Bible Reading: 1 Peter 4:7-11
Continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8
JACOB RAN HOME after school, feeling like he’d been kicked by his classmates. If I’m just a dirtball as they say, he thought to himself, then no one wants to be around me. Fine. I don’t want to be around them. He went into his room, shut the door, and slipped on his headphones. With the music blasting loud enough to blow his eardrums, he tried hard to think about anything but people.
There’s a problem with Jacob’s approach to life: You can’t resign from the human race. God custom-designed you to be involved with people of all kinds-even those who get on your nerves and make that feat look impossible. You’re made to help people, work through difficulties with them, enjoy them, comfort them, and guide them to Christ.
But God didn’t design you to do good to people and then leave you clueless how to do it. His Word is the manufacturer’s handbook for how you’re to live.
The key is love-and God wrote the book on love, literally. God’s Book invites you to experience his love for you through his Son, Jesus. It commands you to put love into practice as you get along with the world around you. And it instructs you on how to show that love. Unless you put the Bible’s lessons into practice, you miss out on the true reasons you exist.
Here are honest facts you need to understand in order to cooperate with God’s priority of love in relationships:
- Love is a “universal moral absolute.” To love is always right. Not to love is always wrong.
- Love is more than hearts, flowers, and drippy songs. Love is a choice. A conscious action. A real response.
- Love isn’t an option. The Bible’s supreme command to Christians is to love God and love people.
- Love is often hard. Sometimes figuring out the loving thing to do is tough. Sometimes doing the loving thing is even tougher.
- Love never fails. But sometimes we fail-at loving God and others. Despite our best intentions, we sometimes act unloving.
All around you every day there are people who need God’s real, life-changing love. You’re not an island. You’re made to swim in the ocean of God’s love.
REFLECT: When have you wanted to pull away from your world? How does God’s law of love make that not a long-term option?
PRAY: Ask the God of love to keep teaching you what it means to love him and others.
