“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails” (NIV). Most of us have probably heard these verses in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 many times. These words are quoted, used in sermons, framed on people’s walls, or even put on a social media bio. Yet as much as we hear these verses, sometimes it is challenging for us to actually put them into practice. Sometimes we become too familiar with God’s Word, taking it for granted and not truly understanding what it means. In this “month of love,” as people call it, how do we know what love actually means? God’s Word has the answer for that.
God gives us a clear and quite beautiful definition of love all throughout Scripture. As mentioned above, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 is a great place to start. When reading this passage, we must not rush through it with a thought of “oh yeah, I know all of this already.” Instead we must come to God with a heart posture of, “What do You want me to learn here? Take me deeper in my understanding of Your Word, Lord, for I want to grow in You.” Then, as we read the verses, let us ponder them. Let them sit for a bit in our minds before we rush off to something else. We must let the words sink in deep, not just something we skim with our eyes, but something we actually take to heart.
In the beginning of this passage, God lists out many key distinctions of how He defines love: patience, kindness, humility, selflessness, forgiveness, truthfulness, protectiveness, trustworthiness, hopefulness, and perseverance. These are some of the many characteristics of His love for us, and they are also characteristics of the love we are called to give. In John 13:34 (NIV) Jesus says, “‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’” Of course, God deserves our first love—the very first place in our hearts, our highest priority—and Scripture is very clear about this, such as in Matthew 22:37-38, Mark 12:30, and Revelation 2:4. But after God, you could say “second place,” is people. Yet sometimes it is so hard to love them—that friend who hurt you, that family member who is so annoying and gets on your nerves all the time, that unbeliever in the world who is so lost and far away from Jesus—and you just don’t understand why they act the way they do. Still, those people are the very ones we are called to love. We are not just called to love those who are fun and make us feel good because they are so nice, but we are also called to love those who seem unlovable. When Jesus laid down His life and hung stretched out on that cross, enduring unimaginable pain, He did it out of love for us—love we didn’t deserve. Romans 5:8 (NKJV, emphasis added) reminds us, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When Jesus laid down His life for us, there was not a single person saved and cleansed by His blood. And even in the midst of all our sin, all the things that made us seem so unlovable, even when we turned our backs on Him and gave Him every reason to hate us, He still chose to love us, and He proved that at the cross.
So how do we do it? How do we love those whom we just want to walk away from? Well, we first need to go back to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 to understand that loving people does not mean asking “what can I get from this person?” but rather “what can I give this person?” And we don’t even have to agree with the person in order for us to love them. We should never agree with the sins of people—the sins are not what we are called to love. We are called to love the people, the person behind the sin. Christ exemplified this for us. When He died for us, He didn’t say “I’m doing this because I love your sin.” No, the Bible is clear He hates sin because sin destroys the goodness, freedom, and harmony He created us to live in. Instead, Jesus showed us it is possible to hate the sin and love the sinner at the same time. We can disagree with the way a person acts, but we are still called to love them. This love we give to them does not center around a feeling, rather it is about an act of humble and selfless service. It is pushing past that rising feeling inside you that yells, “But what about me?” It is giving on a chance you might not receive the same back from certain people. We can only give this kind of selfless love through Christ’s help. Just as Christ has poured His love upon us, we must let His love pour through us as we interact with people. On our own, it is impossible to love those who hurt us, annoy us, and don’t make sense to us, but through Him, relying on Him, we are enabled to give this selfless love to them. We lean back into Jesus and say “I don’t know how to love this person, so I need You to love them through me.” We open our hearts to Him and His love pours through us as if we are a container, a vessel, that receives water on one side and pours it out on the other side, but the water is His love.
His Word is clear that we were created to be loved and to give love, first to God and then to others. Genuine love is not the love that we hear the world shouting about. The NKJV translation of 1 Corinthians 13:4 actually says “love does not parade itself, is not puffed up [arrogant].” And 1 John 3:18 reminds us “let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions.” Love—the way God designed it to be—is not a bad thing, but a beautiful thing, because God, who is love, defines it. We could discuss the four different kinds of love, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, but to keep it simple, no matter who you are giving your love to, the Bible points to the fact that love is a selfless action that comes from a selfless motive. Even when Christ died for us on the cross, His motive was purely selfless: His love for us. So, let us walk in these truths as we love one another for “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV).
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