Part II
God’s love has the power to transform us. Have you experienced his transforming love? Perhaps you have been born from above through faith in Jesus Christ, but you still aren’t basking in the incredible truth that the God of the universe loves you—knows your name, is intimately acquainted with all your ways, wrote all your days in his book before one of them came to be, and holds you in the palm of his hand. The Apostle John refers to himself in his Gospel as “the one Jesus loves,” not arrogantly or proudly, because of course he knew that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But his identity was based on the knowledge that Jesus loved him.
I want to encourage you to make it a point to start each day by reminding yourself of this mind-blowing truth—you are the one Jesus loves. The more you are aware of God’s love for you, primarily displayed in Jesus, the more that love will transform you and the more you’ll be able to love others in ways that will transform them.
I encourage you once again to start each day reading 1 Corinthians 13, which is the ultimate description of God’s kind of love, the love we should be expressing to others. And we see that love is an action, not necessarily a feeling. It is choosing to act in loving ways, whether your emotions cooperate or not. And when we begin to act in loving ways, good things happen.
For example, here’s a couple of changes that are often the result of loving people with God’s kind of love:
- Love has the power to inspire someone to greatness.
Do you know someone who is wasting their potential? Maybe they don’t even know they have potential, or perhaps they’re fearful of trying. I wonder—if they knew that you see potential in them, if you loved them by encouraging them, could it empower them to reach their potential?
Do you remember when Jesus called Simon as a disciple and gave him the name of Peter? He referred to Peter as a rock and said that Peter would play a pivotal role in establishing the early church and spreading the gospel. Was Simon Peter a rock when Jesus called him? No, he had a long way to go before he reached “rock status,” but Jesus called him what he would become, and Peter became the rock of the early church.
I have a dear friend who many years ago was bothered by a stutter. But I saw potential in her; she had the instincts of a performer and so I encouraged her to take small parts in a ministry at church that put her in front of people. She loved doing it so she joined Toastmasters, where she learned to make presentations. Now she is very polished and gifted as a speaker and actor, and that stutter has been conquered. I just loved the potential I saw in her, and she has done what she never thought she could do as a result.
- Love has the power to heal wounds and bind up the brokenhearted.
I love this verse from Isaiah 61:
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.
We have the incredible privilege, as we spread the love of Jesus, to help people find freedom from their past, freedom from what has held them in bondage. And when you reach out to such a person because of your love for them and your desire to see them released from their darkness, you become an agent of transformation.
I think of a woman who knew that something was missing in her life, even though she was very successful, had the job she always dreamed of, making the money she planned to make. Then a co-worker lived the gospel in front of her, everyday showing peace and kindness and contentment in a place where chaos reigned, and finally she started a conversation with him and he encouraged her to read the Bible, and after several months and many conversations, she came to saving faith in Jesus, and her life was totally transformed—totally. His love for Jesus and his confidence in who he was in Jesus overflowed to her and transformed her life.
Love has the power to transform people and situations and workplaces and homes and churches. But we must consistently be attuned to how much we are loved by God, growing in the knowledge of his love for us, so that we have love to share with others.
Read this prayer that the Apostle Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus:
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
I just love Paul’s phrase—to know the love that surpasses knowledge. How can you know something that is beyond knowing? Well, that’s the way God’s love is. It is so wide and long and high and deep that we will spend all of eternity exploring the depths of God’s love. And because that love is spread abroad in our hearts through faith in Jesus Christ, it fills us up to the measure of all the fullness of God. And that fullness then overflows to those around us. It’s such a wonderful truth.
Loving and being loved is a true basic necessity of life. We were created by God with this need to love and be loved. This need is at the core of your being, and if you don’t feel that you are loved, it leaves a huge empty space in your sense of worth and value.
The sad truth is that if you grew up without feeling loved as you should have been, it can leave you emotionally needy, and that means you can’t love others as you should. You don’t have love to give, so to speak. This lack of love and loving then can lead to all kinds of emotional and mental problems, such as resentment, bitterness, a judgmental spirit, depression. And then your lack of love from others begets more lack of love from you to others. It becomes a vicious cycle.
This great need for love can lead you to look for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes, and put you on an endless quest for acquiring love, and that quest actually takes you further and further away from true, unconditional love. Can you relate to this? No doubt you know people who are on or have been on that futile quest for love.
Here’s the incredible good news: God’s love for you can fill up that emptiness inside, which then gives you the ability to love others, and then you’ll discover that the love you give others comes back to you. We get love by giving it away, and we have love to give away because we know we are loved by Jesus.
So, if you want to fill up your inner coffers with love, find some ways today to love others. Who is in your life today that needs some love?
It doesn’t take much to share love with someone else. We just have to remember to do it because love is an action. That means we need to pray that God will help us to become lovers—people who willingly and frequently share his love with others. Remember, love begets love.
When was the last time you told someone, “I love you”? I hope it hasn’t been long and I hope it hasn’t been long since someone returned that expression of love to you. Love has the power to transform us, both as givers and receivers of love.
I’m not speaking necessarily of romantic love, though of course that certainly can transform us, can’t it? Rather, just love in general—knowing that we are loved and being able to love others is able to change you, put a smile on your face, put a lift in your step, transform the mundaneness of life into something meaningful. All because we are loved and are loving.
That’s why Paul wrote to the Corinthians that love never fails. What else in life can you say “never fails”? The best computer you can buy can and does fail. The best friend can fail you. The best job can fail to deliver what you need or want. God can never fail you, and God is love. So love never fails.
It never fails to transform that person who is difficult, though it may take longer than you want. I remember when a friend of mine, Beth, worked for a very difficult manager; no one liked her; she was demanding, unfriendly, sour—just a miserable person. God used a verse— Proverbs 19:6—to tell Beth how to show love to this woman. That verse says, “Many curry favor with a ruler, and everyone is the friend of one who gives gifts.” She knew God wanted her to give this woman a gift on her birthday.
So, she bought something small but thoughtful and wrote a note thanking her for pursuing excellence, and left it on her desk on her birthday. This simple act of love transformed that woman and she and Beth became friends from that point on. With tears in her eyes, she said to Beth that no one had ever given her a birthday gift before. Because Beth was willing to obey God’s voice to show love to this woman, it transformed her, filling up a huge empty space inside of her and changing that relationship.
Love is powerful. It never fails. So, I hope you will more and more bask in the incredibly good news that God loves you and nothing can separate you from his love. And then you will become more and more intentional about loving others. It has the power to transform you, your relationships, your attitude, your productivity—love transforms us. Believe me, it’s true.