Me and my friends love watching the bachelor on Mondays. We make a whole deal out of it and it’s so fun. Last night as we were watching, Colton said “love means risking everything and putting everything on the line, love means being adventurous.” I thought to myself hmmm, is that what love means? maybe? I don’t think so? And as I began to think about what he said, I realized that there are so many different things trying to convince me that love is this or love is that. There are false portrayals of love everywhere in society. Almost all songs are about love, loosing it, hating it, loving it, you name it. The word love is everywhere and everyone, but at the same time no-one, seems to really know what love is.
With so many different definitions and versions of “love” presented to us, it can be hard to grasp the true meaning of it and what, in its purest form, it looks like. People tell us what we have to do to in order to be loved, society tells us what makes us desirable and worthy of being loved. We see movies and the characters have what we might think “real love” looks like and we want that for ourselves. Culture tells us love behaves a certain way. Our past experiences and what we consume mentally day to day have shaped the way we think about love. We sometimes tend to think about Jesus’s love in the terms of what we know about earthly love. As we wonder, search and try to understand what true love looks like, Jesus has shown us! Jesus lived a life of perfect love and he preaches that we should love others. The good news is that Jesus didn’t leave us with this command empty-handed. He left a perfectly detailed description about what love is and how love behaves! Its so great, here it is…
“Love is patient and kind. love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. it does not demand its own way. it is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. it does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever he truth wins out. love never gives up, never looses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Jesus goes on after this and says that three things will last forever ( that’s a long time!! ) “…faith, hope and love- and the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13. He tells us what love is and that it is eternal and the greatest thing a human can have. Jesus’s life and his sacrifice on the cross for all of humanity is the ultimate example of love. He lead his life with love and He loves every single one of us unlike any love we’ve ever known. This love doesn’t give up on us and keeps no record of being wronged. This love endures through every circumstance. We can’t keep putting earthly limits on the love our Heavenly Father has for us! We can’t keep putting earthly limits on the love we have and we show to the people around us.
It would change our relationships, our lives, our community, our city, the whole world if we began to extend the type of love that 1 Corinthians describes. Jesus shares with us what true love really looks like because he knows that if we listened, it would make our relationships stronger and better. He knows that we will never be perfect at it, and that we will constantly mess up, and that’s ok. We need Jesus’s help to love others in the best way we can. So let’s be intentional and honor the Lord with the way we love others.
I hope you guys got something out of this, I know that i’m for sure going to work on the way I love the people around me. Thank you so much for taking your time to read this!
Lots of love, Brooke <3
