As the month of February comes to a conclusion, and the winter season
starts to fade, we see that Valentine’s day has brought about as much
love into the world as a Hershey’s Kiss. Our government is still
fighting, inwardly, violent crimes and murders are a constant fixture
in nightly news, and, now, elementary schools are teaching your young,
innocent child sexual information to assure that they’ll get curious,
and want to try it before they’re married; making sure it continues to
erode the fabric of marital and family life. People are “in love”,
but they’re in love with this world, and all of its fleshly lusts,
and have forsaken the God of the universe.
Now, we’ve already stated that God is Love, and because of that we
know that love has a personality. Love exhibits selfless characteristics
because a selfless God has put the ability to love inside each and
every one of us. No matter how man-kind feels about it we are all a
product of God’s will, and his willingness to show his perfect love
to humanity.
But the one thing that we, as humanity, fail to understand about love
is that love is less emotional than it is a discipline. Oh, I know
you’re wondering where is this going. How can they say that? Surely,
love is emotional, and it makes you feel all bubbly inside, and you
get hot flashes, and sweaty, and you can’t talk around the one you love,
and it makes you do crazy things! But that’s not true at all.
God has never done one crazy thing in all of his actions toward us.
Not one, and he doesn’t get gooey eyed, and doesn’t know what to do
when we show up in the temple, and he’s just so happy to see us that
all the wrong we’ve done, and evil we’ve caused he just over looks it,
and goes “let’s have one big party, and don’t worry about it.”
No. That’s not what happens at all.
It takes more than emotion to put up with ungrateful, stiff necked
people who only come to you when they want something. It takes more
than emotions to put up with a meaningless “I love you” from someone
who doesn’t believe that, either you don’t exist, or you used to exist,
or that your word doesn’t mean the same today as it did in days past.
It takes more than emotion to wait years on end for someone to finally
realize that what you do and say is really in their best interest.
And it takes more than emotion to die a most painful death for people
who didn’t know you, for people who knew you and spit at you, and for
a future band of people who declare that you’re not real, you died,
you’re an evil overlord looking to spoil their fun, or that you didn’t
say what your representatives are saying that you said.
If God loved like us then most of us wouldn’t have a chance on earth to
be saved because man’s ability to hate is far greater than man’s passion
to love. Take a man who beats his wife and children for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. That’s not love. That’s hate. The said part is that he
may not really know that beating his wife is a form of hate. But the
look at the love that she shows in the beginning.
She’ll take up for him. She’ll lie for him. She’ll make excuses for him…
until the day that he kills her. Yes, at some point that’s foolishness,
but in the beginning it’s always because she loved him. He didn’t
love her, though. He hated her.
I leave you with this. If you’re saved, the love that the world needs to
see is not wrapped up, entirely, in your church, or your church members.
You can’t forget to love your family, neighbor, co-workers, and friends.
It’s easy to start loving the people in your church because you know them,
and are familiar with them, but, then, everybody else is a heathen, and
you think that they’re your enemy. But you have to remember at one point
in time you, too, were an enemy to God. However, God’s word in Jeremiah
let’s us know that “therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”
So, we must draw people with lovingkindness. We must exemplify patience,
and we must practice the very, real skill of loving like God. “Love suffereth
long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked,
thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth.” Love conquers all; but then it should.
Because God is love.
