Apologies for the late post this morning. My alarm didn’t go off so I didn’t wake up until 10 minutes after I am normally on the road (thanks, Mom!).
Today’s verse is 1 John 4:16.
16We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.
God is love. It’s something we hear all the time. And it’s probably the most famous thing about God, at least in the world at large. If you ask a complete stranger on the street in America about who God is, they’ll probably respond with some concept centering on the fact that God is love.
And it’s true. But how many of us have actually put our trust in that love?
The human concept of someone being love is being detached from personal relationships. After all, if you love everyone, you can’t love one person more than another. Can you? Or you don’t have the time or energy to invest individually in one person. Do you?
Well, God does. And He offers His love freely to every person in the world, but He doesn’t force Himself on anyone. And His love will only make a difference in our lives if we allow it to.
Love always makes a difference in our lives. When you let other people love you, your whole demeanor changes. Once you allow yourself to be loved, you begin to realize that maybe you’re not as terrible a person as you thought you were. Once you allow yourself to be loved, you start to think that maybe you can love other people in return. And that’s just when you allow yourself to be loved by other people.
But once we allow God to love us, there will be some interesting effects in our lives. And as I have discovered, it’s very similar to what other peoples’ love does to us, just on a different level. Once I realized that God really loved me (not my potential or my actions or my talent–but me), I got a whole different perspective on myself. And once I accepted God’s love in my life, I discovered that His love was too much for me to contain to just myself and I wanted to share it with other people.
And before I knew it, without really even trying, I was living a life of love sharing the love God had given me with everyone I know (and even some people I don’t know and probably won’t ever meet again).
That’s what this verse makes me think of this morning. Once we realize just how much God truely loves us and once we accept His love, it’s too much to contain and we have no choice but to shout His love from the rooftops.
God loves us. So we live in God’s love, and God lives in our love to others.
Always Peachy 