Biblical Love: Part 2 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As you head into your day, don’t forget God. God is there. God loves you. He’s involved in your life. He gave you life, and He wants to shape your life to be meaningful, to be what He designed it to be. And when we let God make our lives what He designed it to be, it’s awesome. And when we hold back from God, it’s a mess.

So let’s put God first in our lives, and one of the most awesome ways to put God first in your life is to take time with Him each day, relational time. So it’s not just you coming with a big list of prayer requests to God. Here’s what I want you to do in my life. He’s the one at the centre of the universe. It’s coming to God to listen to Him. And then, as He speaks into your life through the Bible, His Word, you respond to him and you talk to him about what he’s saying, so let’s read a bit of the Bible together now.

We’re talking about biblical love this week, and yesterday we read the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13, a great chapter read in weddings because it’s all about love, and there in those first verses, The apostle Paul writing just says love is so much more important than these other things in life, more important than how you talk and more important than the knowledge you have and even self-sacrifice and helping people in need. Much more than that is actually having love for the people in your life. He goes on from there to describe what love is all about.

Starting in verse 4, he says:

Love is patient.

Love is kind.

It’s not jealous.

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Love does not brag and is not arrogant.

Does not act unbecomingly. It does not seek its own.

Is not provoked.

Does not take into account a wrong suffered.

Does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away, for we know in part and we prophesy in part.

Well, Paul’s telling us what love is like patient, kind, humble, slow to anger, not focused on yourself.

Really, at its essence, biblical love is unselfish and not just unselfish, not just putting yourself down, but it’s focused on others.

It endures. It lasts. It doesn’t come and go with how someone’s treating you. It is thinking of the good of the other person and especially from God’s perspective. What is going to help this person in their inner life move towards what God wants them to be.

It’s unnatural often to try and practise biblical love. The reason for that is because it’s foreign to our sinful nature, our fallen nature. The Bible tells us that when mankind first chose not to go God’s way, but to go our own way and put ourselves at the centre of our own lives, that something changed in our basic nature.

And our nature became flawed so that we are constantly focused on self, self, self. What matters to me, my instant reaction when something happens in my life is to think about how it impacts on me, how it affects me, if someone treats me a certain way. I’m focused on what it means to me.

I’m not thinking about what’s going on in that person’s life that’s making them act this way. How can God meet them at their point of need? How can I encourage them? No, I tend to naturally think about myself and how things impact on me, but biblical love, God’s kind of love, is focused on the other person after all.

In our own lives without God in our lives, we’re just offending God constantly, aren’t we? We’re doing things in our lives, thinking things, saying things that are hurtful that we know are not pleasing to God. And yet God still loves us. He still reaches out to us. So if we want to love other people that way, guess who we need to turn to? God. He’s the only one who can love through us in that way.

I’m John North.

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