Love is the very nature of God and Christians should be the carriers of this great privilege, to take love wherever they are.  Without love, there is little or nothing much that is pleasant or truly worthwhile in this world or in our lives, but we must look to God for love.

One of the signs of a true or maturing Christian is a person that sincerely loves others with no thought about oneself.  It's that brother or sister from church that mostly has a smile on their face, a sincere smile, it is the person that is mostly ready to help others, and to make a sacrifice for the person next to them even if they do not know each other very well.

True love is good and pure, and there is one other thing about it, it can only come from God.  It can only show itself when Christ is the one that is completely in charge of the Christian.  When we try to give love from our own strength, we will fail miserably, because only the Lord is the one capable of giving true love, so you see that we can't give true love by ourselves.

The very first thing that we have to love in our Christian life isn't the people about us, before anything else, we have to love God, and not in just any fashion, we have to love Him with a loving and reverent heart.

²⁵ On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
²⁶“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered:  ²⁷“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” ²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Luke 10:25-28 NIV

This is the first and great commandment.

We have to put God first in our lives, before our family, before our friends, before anything else that we might have, it is not always that easy.  It is very hard to let go of some things, because God has asked it of you, but everything in us must be tuned to loving the Lord and putting Him first, before anything else.  He asks this of us for our own benefit, because He loves us!

Jesus said, ¹⁵“If you love me, you will obey what I command.
¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—
¹⁷the Spirit of truth.  The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him.  But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
¹⁸I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
¹⁹Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me.  Because I live, you also will live.
²⁰On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
²¹Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.  He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”
John 14:15-21 NIV

We are to love God with everything that is in us, this is not only the right thing to do for Jesus that saved us, it is also a direct commandment of God; we are being obedient to Him when we love Him, when we are in submission to God, and because of our love for Him we are obedient in serving him.  Christ then has the chance through the Holy Spirit to make something wonderful out of our lives, it is then that He can start the molding and shaping of our lives that will be ultimately for His glory.

When we have the true love of God showing through our lives it does not always mean that we will be in the spotlight, praised for the way we are living and so on!  We should not get any praise out of the matter.  All the praise and all the glory belong to God that is why we are here to begin with.

The true love of God being made manifest in our lives does not only make our relationship with the Lord better, it also prepares us for a life of service and gets us through the times when it seems that there is nothing left to look forward to.  It is the best way to go through life, because not only does it bring you closer to your Savior, it also allows people to see Christ in you; when a person sees that something about you is different, when they see that you can go through things and do things with a smile on your face and with that something just shining out of you the whole time, what they are seeing is the love of God in you.  They are also seeing Christ in you, because along with a true love for God comes a state of complete humbleness and obedience before God that allows Christ to start working in your life and in the lives of others through you.

²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
³If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
⁴Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
⁸Love never fails.  But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
¹⁰but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
¹³And now these three remain:  faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:2-13 NIV

We can put on a good show and bluff a lot of people, but if we do not have the love of God working on our lives we are nothing, as the verse says above.  We are absolutely nothing.  Blessed are the people that have the love of God in their lives!

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