Question: What is Love (part two)

So my last post was about answering the question, “What is love?” After talking about it a lot, I finally brought you to a list of what love is, along with one of what love is not.  This list came from breaking down the Apostle Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13.  If you haven’t read that post I suggest checking it out here.  

Today we’ll continue that subject and look at how a person can love.  Looking at all of those traits it seems like an extremely daunting task to obtain all of them.  In actuality, when I first made the list I didn’t think that I possessed any of those traits.  I fit in better with the Hate side than the Love side.  So how did I change myself?  Well, honestly I didn’t, God did.  I know cheesy answer but I’m going to take you through the practical things I found.  

First thing to do is to make sure that you know God.  Here’s what I mean.  To love like God loves, which is described in part in 1 Corinthians 13, we must know God because God is love.  I’m getting this from a letter the Apostle John wrote to several churches in the late 1^st century.  It states; 

“7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8

What this says is that love comes from God.  If we have been born of God, meaning we have a relationship with Him through the salvation of his son Jesus Christ, then we can love fully like God because God is in us.  Well, that was a mouthful.  Maybe it’s better said like this - Because God is love, and we are in him through his Son Jesus, you/I can learn to love like God.  

This is really the only way to love fully, is to be in him.  Yes, we can argue that those of you who don’t believe in God can love as well and a semblance of that might be true, however, I’m under the firm belief that it is through God that we can obtain a love that is immensely greater than our own.  

The second thing I had to do was transform my mind.  Paul writes in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  What this means is that for anything to change in my life, I must first change the way I think about it.  For me to view myself as a loving person, I had to change my mindset and in doing so, God transformed my heart.  

Now don’t get me wrong here, this is not easy and it is a process.  It took us nearly a year of me working at Starbucks dealing with all kinds of difficult, demanding people to come to the realization that the entire purpose of me being there had been fulfilled.  I’m not done either.  The process is continuing to this day and will continue on, but the transformation is one of the essential steps in learning to love.  

So, time for a self-assessment.  Are you loving like God is calling you to love? Are you being honest with yourself? 

Question: What is Love?

As a Christian, I hear about loving others, and I’ve definitely been no stranger to saying that we need to love others.  But what is love, really?  Is it what we see in movies or read about in books?  Is it what we of when we think about our high school romance?  Is it what we think our parents have towards us that keeps them from completely disowning us?  Is love that thing that holds to brothers or sisters together even though they have completely different lifestyles?  

Thinking about it in those ways, it seems as though we’ll never really know what love is, which leads to another question, if we can’t even really define love, how can we properly show it?  As a Christian, it’s easy to say that we show love by showing people Jesus.  While that does hold some legitimacy, it just seems cheesy to me, and while I really like eating cheese, I don’t like to hear it.  So if you will, let’s take a journey together through what I’ve learned about love.  

Now I’m sure most of you have heard this recited at a wedding.  “Love is patient, Love is kind…” and so forth, but really have no idea where it comes from.  Well, it comes from a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to an ancient church in the city or Corinth.  It is in the middle of this letter that Paul gives us a beautiful description of love.  If you want to read it, grab a bible and look up 1 Corinthians 13, or click here. 

The more I read this, and the more I’ve studied Scripture, the more alive it came to me.  As God was teaching me to love people last year, this became a key passage for me, and here’s how I broke it down. 

Love is…

• Patient
• Kind
• Slow to Anger
• Keeps no record of Wrong
• Delights in Truth
• Always Protects
• Always Trust
• Always Hopes
• Always Perseveres
• Never Fails

I also came to the conclusion through this passage that the opposite of love is Hate. It looks like this;

Hate is…

• Envious
• Boastful
• Proud
• Selfish
• Easily Angered
• Keeps a vault of wrongs and constantly uses them against us
• Full of half-truths and pure evil
• Will Fail 

After looking at these two list, I’ve come to realize what love is.  I believe that it helps teach us what love can looks like.  Whatever relationships we have; romantic, brotherly, working, or friendly, they all benefit from showing love.  Whether its with my wife or a co-worker, showing love in the form of kindness, patience, or trust allows that relationship to grow far more than if I show selfishness, boastfulness, or pride.  Love is what makes relationships worth having.  Without it, everything we do is pointless.  

Later we’ll how to love a little deeper in Scripture, but I want to leave you with this question, 

Do you typically show Love or Hate in your relationships?

Question: What does waiting mean?

What does it mean to wait on God?

What does it mean to wait? 

What does wait even mean?

Right now I’m going through a part of life where I’m having to wait - A LOT, so those are the questions I’m asking.  Some of you may know, but I’ve yet to learn what it really means to wait on God.  I understand that we’re supposed too, but many times I feel like we confuse waiting with laziness, and I hate laziness, especially in myself so in turn, I really hate the idea of waiting.  In case you’re wondering, here’s some of the background.

This past summer my wife and I traveled with a great ministry called Clear Camps.  This was our second summer to travel with the organization and we absolutely wouldn’t have done anything else.  We made some great friends and got to learn a lot of what it means to be leaders.  

After the summer my wife was able to go back to her job, but I felt that the Lord wanted me to not go back to mine.  I was fine with that as I felt that it was only a job for a season.  I learned a great deal about myself.  But coming back, knowing what the Lord had called me to, I expected to find a job quickly.  

After we got back from the summer I did what most of us would do and start contacting people for opportunities and applying for jobs.  In doing this though, and without including God in the decision making process, we can easily get ourselves into all sorts of problems.  For me, it was pursuing an opportunity that I really didn’t know much about, but had heard some significant things about it from the amazing people I met within that organization. The more I got in, the more I realized how much it wasn’t for me.  

Opportunity number two didn’t pose much success either as it didn’t go past the first meeting.  I became extremely discouraged after this, as some of you can imagine.  It was here that I really began to search for what the Lord was wanting me to do, and his answer was, Wait. 

If you’re anything like me and grown up in church, then waiting on God is not a new concept as we hear it all the time.  David wrote about waiting in the Psalms.  Paul discussed waiting on Christ in his writings.  So it’s not a new thing.  

Despite that, I need a practical answer.  I need action steps.  A path to take.  Something beyond, “Wait, because it’s in the Bible.”  To me, that answer for any problem in life is useless.  It gives nothing of value, at least not to me.  Nevertheless here’s what I wound up doing, looking up the definition of wait.

Here’s what I found: Wait - to stay, to serve or attend to (like a waiter in a restaurant or nurse), to patiently anticipate, to look forward to eagerly, and to be available or in readiness. 

The ones that caught me were “to patiently anticipate” and “to be available or in readiness.”

Now some of you may look at that and prefer the word wait. To patiently anticipate is no better of an explanation.  I get that.  It’s just a word thing for me.  There’s more action involved in anticipation for me than waiting.  I really like the action part, the one that gives some sort of movement. Let's look at this verse. 

Psalm 130:5 says, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

It really is a great verse. Wait on the Lord, and put our hope in his Word. But it doesn’t say too much to me. Consider this paraphrase with me 

• I patiently anticipate the Lord, my soul stands in readiness, and in him all my expectations are centered. 

So my conclusion is this.  To wait on the Lord is to patiently anticipate his calling us to action.  It is searching for Him.  It is be ready to go when he says go and stop when he says stop.  Waiting is the antithesis of laziness and idleness.  Waiting is expecting.  

So now, when the Lord tells me to wait I know, Waiting = Patiently Anticipate in Readiness.

Book Review: Greater

I recently finished reading the book Greater by Steven Furtick. He is well known as the writer of Sun Stand Still and the lead pastor of Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Greater: dream bigger, start smaller, ignite God’s vision for your life is a book about just that, igniting God’s vision for our lives. Throughout this entire book he shows us that God is ready to give us more, if we are willing to go for it. Furtick says, “The thing is, most believers aren’t in imminent danger of ruining their lives. They’re facing a danger that’s far greater: wasting them.”  His desire is for every Christian to find the full potential God has for them. 

Overall this book was really great to read.  Furtick bases his entire work on the life of Elisha, and how he came to be one of the greatest prophets we know of in Scripture. He is saying that God has more for each and everyone of us, just like he had for Elisha. This book sure has challenged me to look at my own faith and walk with God and see that there is much more to Christianity than living a mundane life. My kindle version is now full of highlights and notes! 

I received this e-book for free to review from Waterbrook Multnomah Publishers. If you would like your own copy I suggest Amazon. 

David

Trust

Trust. It’s something I believe all Christians struggle with from time to time. Circumstances, emotions, maybe past experiences, but most probably Satan’s lies, can all lead us to a place where we find it hard to trust others, and even God. Most of those times it’s probably logical, valid, and very understandable to think; “Where is God?” “What is he doing?”or “How can God be in this?” Or, as Andy Stanley says, what do you do when God is Inattentive, Uncooperative, or Late?

But even in those times, where we feel like God is nowhere to be found, we can have confidence in the fact that he is trustworthy. He is faithful, constant, loyal and so on. What’s intriguing for me is that he often reminds me of this before I go through a season that could lead to distrust in Him. Let’s look at some of the scripture he showed me:

Matthew 28:6 “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” (NIV)
In my mind that verse reads like this - “He’s not here. He’s risen, just as he said he would. Go and look if you don’t believe me. 

Here’s what I think the take away is from this:

1. Jesus’ words were 100% fulfilled. He said that he would be killed and then rise from the dead in three days. His words can be trusted. 
2. As God speaks to us today, we can rest in knowing that He will fulfill his promises to us. 

To remind you that His word can be trusted from beginning to end, let’s go to Genesis 13:14-18; 

"14 The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, “Look around from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west. 15 All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. 17 Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.”18 So Abram went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he pitched his tents. There he built an altar to the Lord."

This is where God first gives Abram a promise that he will make his offspring like the dust of the earth. But, it wasn’t until many years, and a few screw ups on Abram’s part that God began to fulfill this promise through Isaac.  Years later, after the birth of Isaac, I’m sure Abraham was wondering, “God, why are you asking me to sacrifice the son you have given me? How will my offspring be like the dust of the earth if you take him from me?” (Gen 22).  But at this point, we know the rest of the story. Through his obedience, God blessed Abraham, but in those first moments, I’m sure he went through many doubts and questions, wondering if God would really provide the lamb.

So what is God asking you to trust him with today? I bet some of us are where Abraham was in those moments where God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. He’s asking us to give up something. To trust Him. Others of us may be at the beginning, where God has given us a promise, but has yet to fulfill it. And some may be able to look back and see the whole story up to this point. God promised you something and fulfilled it. 

All in all, God is trustworthy. His Word shows us that from the beginning to end. We may not know exactly what he is doing, or when he’ll do it, but he will. 

What is God asking you to trust him with today, in this season of your life?