sokin's devotional 68 - love is an action
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers...Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:16, 18
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Words bear weight and are necessary to convey and experience love, but if there is no purposefulness to it...if the words are just casually given without heart-deep conviction, then we are just spewing words without meaning.
I think the passage here is not simply suggesting that true love involves a physical doing necessarily...who is to say that a person who has no physical ability to lift a finger is also incapable of truly loving?
But I think this is suggesting the idea that our love, expressed in words, also needs to bear weight in our soul and must be an action... Our words can be our action of love...our physical doing can also be an action of love (obviously)
We cannot just expect to "talk" words of love without the heart attached to it. No one would nor should receive that type of "love" (if we can call it that).
And on a more obvious note, if you are physically able, loving others must take action. We can practically list a whole bunch of things here but loving our brothers and sisters in Christ should be a natural overflow of the eternal, agape love we have received from God - thus, Christians should be the best lovers in the world!
We look at the love of God perfectly seen and exemplified through Jesus Christ, and we can see that love also involves a little bit (sometimes a whole lot) of dying to ourselves. Jesus literally gave his life for us...we must also do the same for each other. Die to our pride, die to our rights and comfort...and seek to love on others well and lavishly.
It takes effort...it takes time..it takes work.
If you want to go deeper (in all relationships), you have to dig.
Let us love not with weightless words, but with action and truth and spirit. May our words be a faithful action done in complete surrender and desire to love well. May our actions speak louder than our words. May we be lovers of God first and foremost, so that our love for others may model and mimic that great, everlasting love of the Father.
1 John 3:16, 18
---
Words bear weight and are necessary to convey and experience love, but if there is no purposefulness to it...if the words are just casually given without heart-deep conviction, then we are just spewing words without meaning.
I think the passage here is not simply suggesting that true love involves a physical doing necessarily...who is to say that a person who has no physical ability to lift a finger is also incapable of truly loving?
But I think this is suggesting the idea that our love, expressed in words, also needs to bear weight in our soul and must be an action... Our words can be our action of love...our physical doing can also be an action of love (obviously)
We cannot just expect to "talk" words of love without the heart attached to it. No one would nor should receive that type of "love" (if we can call it that).
And on a more obvious note, if you are physically able, loving others must take action. We can practically list a whole bunch of things here but loving our brothers and sisters in Christ should be a natural overflow of the eternal, agape love we have received from God - thus, Christians should be the best lovers in the world!
We look at the love of God perfectly seen and exemplified through Jesus Christ, and we can see that love also involves a little bit (sometimes a whole lot) of dying to ourselves. Jesus literally gave his life for us...we must also do the same for each other. Die to our pride, die to our rights and comfort...and seek to love on others well and lavishly.
It takes effort...it takes time..it takes work.
If you want to go deeper (in all relationships), you have to dig.
Let us love not with weightless words, but with action and truth and spirit. May our words be a faithful action done in complete surrender and desire to love well. May our actions speak louder than our words. May we be lovers of God first and foremost, so that our love for others may model and mimic that great, everlasting love of the Father.
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