Biblical Love: Part 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. Getting your day started right is a fantastic way to get going, and the best way to start your day is by taking some time with God.

And we love doing that every weekday at this time, just opening the Bible and saying, God, do you have something to say to me in my life, because I want to build my life around you. And since He is the Maker of our lives and the designer of the whole universe, it’s probably a good thing to build our lives around Him.

In fact, don’t you find in your own life that when you build your life around God and His way of life, that the other areas of your life come into place and into focus, they fit in their rightful place in your life.

And when you kind of push God away and just do things your own way, don’t you so often just mess things up and things get out of balance in your life? Shouldn’t that teach you there’s nothing more important than your relationship with God? So let’s start the day by listening to God, and we want to talk this week on the theme of biblical love, and we want to go to the great chapter on love, probably read at every wedding.

And that is 1 Corinthians 13, and just listen to what the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I’m nothing.

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And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned or self-sacrifice for others, but I do not have love, it profits me nothing.

Wow. Thinking about what Paul says here, you can’t help noticing, can you, the importance of love. It’s more important than what you say, more important than knowledge, more important than generosity, more important than self-sacrifice. It’s really quite contrary to our human nature, isn’t it?

We long to be eloquent when we talk and to be looked up to for our good deeds and our unselfishness. We approve of education and getting knowledge. If only we valued God’s kind of love in the same way and gave it that place of importance in our lives.

Love.

You know, you can’t just generate love, can you? It’s not something you can just work up inside of you. The kind of love you need to express in your life, it comes from God.

Don’t think you can just become a loving person by willpower and thinking that’s what I need to be. Build your relationship with God and ask God to begin loving people through you. What do you think today? Who are you going to see today? In your family, in your neighbourhood, at work.

How could God love those people through you?

What a great way to approach your day. It makes your day so much more significant, so much more meaningful, and how much those people will enjoy being around you when you’re not just trying to get out of your relationships with them, but you’re giving into your relationships with them. Awesome.

Let God love people through you today.

I’m John North.

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