Love Others As God Loves You

Good morning and welcome to Our Daily Walk.

Audio version at http://tinyurl.com/2ouhky

Love abounds in our lives but we often overlook it. You can see love in people at the grocery, at the restaurant and even in the passing cars on the highway. You can also see it in the hope-filled eyes of two young people as they begin to date. But to see love exemplified sometimes you need to see it from a different perspective.

Each day without exception you will find her there by the bedside of her husband in a nursing home facility. Some days he knows she is there. Other days he doesn’t. But that doesn’t matter. She is there anyway. Her promise to him many decades earlier was to love, cherish and honor one another until death separated them. It didn’t matter if the days were filled with poverty or riches, sickness or health. They had made their commitment to love one another.

True love like this no doubt was tested over the years, yet it remains stronger in the end than in the beginning. This kind of love was based partly in expectation—an expectation that we hold to our promise to God, to one another and to ourselves.

In part, our love to one another is also based upon the love that God has shown to us. Consider what John wrote in 1 John 4:9-21.

In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. We love Him because He first loved us.

If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.

There can be no doubt in the Christian’s mind that God really does love us. He sent His only Son to die in our place. Now that’s love! But God’s love to mankind wasn’t based on our mutual love to Him in return. Instead is was in spite of our rejection of God that Jesus came and died in our place. God’s act of love was given in hopes that we would accept His love and give our love to Him in return.

That’s why to the Christians God commands us to love one another as well as to love Him. In so doing we become an extension of His work on earth and we may enable others to be drawn to Him through our love.

In a world full of divorce it is especially refreshing to see a husband and wife who hold their marriage together until the end despite the inevitable difficulties of life. And it is even more refreshing to see a godly love being shown to others who certainly do not deserve it.

On Our Daily Walk today, may we choose to be more loving to those today who do not deserve our love. May we look to love others as God loved us and see what a difference it will make.

Our thought for the day: “He loves not Christ at all who does not love Christ above all.”

May God bless you on your daily walk.

© Our Daily Walk, Mike Baker, 2007. Permission is granted to copy these articles provided they are not sold and the author's name and copyright are included.