Love

I feel like anytime I sit down to write, my thoughts are so scattered and this would turn into one of the longest posts EVER. So, instead I will just share some verses. Afterall, they do not return void and my words SURELY will. So a big focus area in my life right now is love. Not the romantic type, despite the efforts of the elderly ladies in my church. The type of love that I am not able to understand apart from understanding the Gospel and the love of Christ. Literally anytime I think of love I am pulled to evaluate what I really mean by saying it and is it the same type of love Christ displays. The more I have grown to understand the love of Christ the more heartbreaking it is to look at the definition put out by our culture. The conditional, self-seeking, unenduring definition of love. So I share these verses just to shed some light on what love really is and what it is not.

"...God is love." 1 John 4:8 If God IS love, then apart from Him I can not know what love truly is.

"We love because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19

"but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8 This is how he loved me FIRST. I didn't love Him and he died for me.

"If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same...But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful." Luke 6:32-33;35-36 Christ demonstrated His love for us (Romans 5:8) so that through Him we may be able to demonstrate the same type of love to everyone.

"For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised." Colossians 5:14-15

"Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all of our days." Psalm 90:14

"Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." Psalm 63:3

Please know that the only thing in our lives that will never change is God's love for us. That's for certain. It is from everlasting to everlasting. And understanding that love, as hard as it may be sometimes, is huge in living the life in the joy and peace that Christ intended for us no matter what our circumstances are, how bad someone has hurt us, or how much we think we may have the "right" to not love, because God (being perfect, righteous, and holy) has the ultimate "right" to not love but loves us anyway. Think about it. :)

I just wanted to share this picture, uhhh, because I love her a lot. And maybe just because she is so stinking cute. :)