Love

In Sunday school today, we examined 1 John 4:7-21.  This part of the chapter talks about love. It’s a good one: go and read it.

Here is a sample:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. (Verse 7-8)

The person teaching the class told us that the author of the curriculum said that we can love someone who we do not like. I would take that even farther to say that we can love someone we have never even met.  There are those of us who can even love someone we desperately hate for what that person has done.

I think we link together the idea that love is a feeling with this verse.  Love can certainly be a feeling, but I don’t think that is what John was talking about.  I think love is an action.  It is an action motivated by God who loves us without condition.  Because of that love - because God loved us first - we can love others.  That love isn’t linked to who they are, what they have done, or how we feel about them.  It is independent of all of that.  The love is motivated by God, and we love through how we treat others - with respect, kindness, and compassion.

Don’t get me wrong - there are people who I do not want to love.  There are people who I cannot love.  And yet, I know that they are loved by God.  (By the way, the opposite is true, too.  There are people who cannot or don’t want to love me, and yet I am loved by God). 

As a side note: I always worry when I say something like this because I never want this - this idea that I think is truth - to be the motivation for someone to stay in a relationship where they are being hurt by someone else.  You don’t have to stay in a position to be hurt because you think God wants you to be loving.  Maybe the way God will help you love that person is to eventually (with God’s help) forgive that person - far way from them.

Sorry - rambling post.  My point is that love is an action, independent of the person who receives it.  It’s not a reward for good behavior.