Monthly Archives: February 2021

The Love of Giving

Giving is probably the highest form of loving when you come down to it. Though, I guess in some ways you can give without loving if you’re doing it just because you feel obligated to. But I don’t think you can really love someone if the love doesn’t bring you to give to them. Whether that means giving them money, giving them your stuff, or giving them your time and service.

Generosity is without a doubt a lovely thing. It is beneficial to both ourselves and to those around us. Giving is such a beautiful thing that either one of these two things happen: 

1. You love someone so much that eventually you cannot help but give to them. 
2. You give to someone, even if you may not love the person, and you begin to love them more and more as you continue to give.

There is simply no way to separate the concepts of loving and giving.

And guess what, giving is and always has been God’s preferred, even favorite, form of revealing his love for us. “For God so loved the world that He GAVE His only Son…” – John 3:16 Again, this is without a doubt the most extreme act of love in our entire history! So, if God the Father loved us by giving His Son and God the Son loved us by giving His life, wouldn’t you think that we should love by giving up our money, things, time, and selves to Him and others?

I hope that, as the title of this post suggests, you now grasp that to give is in fact a form of loving. But the title also suggests something else, the idea of loving to give. That may sound intimidating, because we are so used to accumulating as much stuff as possible for ourselves. Maybe because of that tendency it even seems impossible. And I get that, yet it is very possible and is one of the most wonderful behaviors that you can experience and develop.

The Bible actually touches on this concept and it is even praised by God: “So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.” – 2 Corinthians 9:7

My challenge is that, through God’s grace, you move from loving by giving into loving to give, which, based on everything I’ve said so far, really means loving to love.

To get to that point, you must first understand that everything we have is actually given to us in the first place by God because He made and owns all things. We are just stewards of the things that He has allowed us to have. When you get this fact it is much easier to give your possessions to and use them for the Lord. Beyond that, our Heavenly Father is obviously a giver, so it shouldn’t be very hard for us to give up our things to others as well. When it’s easy for us to give, it becomes easy for us to love to give.

So what are you waiting for, get out there and give!

Unconditional, Inconvenient Love

At this point I hope I’ve made it quite clear that God loves you in the most unfathomable way. Unfathomable because of how unconditional His love is as He gave up His completely willing son, Jesus, to take the punishment we duly deserved for our sin. And let’s face it, that also makes this love very inconvenient for Him as it cost Him the greatest price imaginable.

Unconditional, inconvenient love is really, when you come down to it, crazy love. Crazy because it’s a love that, honestly, makes absolutely no sense! It’s a love that we, on our own, aren’t even capable of. It doesn’t line up with our tendency as humans to call for someone to pay for wrongs that have been done at all. We, who are so faulted, desire immediate punishment for every misstep that’s been made. God, who is perfect, offers up grace and withholds punishment for as long as He possibly can. 

Are you catching on to why it’s so crazy? In our minds that sort of thing is plainly unfair! To us, Jesus taking our beating and handling everything is something that couldn’t, shouldn’t be. We either think we’ve done too much wrong or that we have enough willpower to right our wrongs or simply do no wrong. None of these mentalities line up with the Bible because it clearly tells us that God can save anyone and we can’t save ourselves. We wouldn’t have done it that way with our limited minds. We just don’t get it! Only God could come up with such a perfect, mind-blowing system. So, come to think of it, it’s not that crazy for Him to love this way because He’s the only being that’s even capable of doing so. 

Because God is the only one that is initially capable of such love, that brings me to reiterate some of my comments from my introduction post. The fact that only He can love this way causes us to rely on Him to love the same way. This is why the concept from 1 John 4:19, that we only love because He first loved us, is true. And this is why we can, and it only makes sense to rely on Him for our very identity and for every good thing that is in us. When we understand that we can only have unconditional, inconvenient love through God, only then can we know how to show and live that love.

“Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 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.” – 1 John 4:7-8,10-11

Do you get that? We love others because love is of God and those who love are born of & know God. And vice versa. God is literally the very essence of love, so for us to truly know God that means we’re going to be portraying love. That’s just the way it works. It makes sense and there’s really nothing else to it. God revealed to us just how great His unconditional, inconvenient love is with the perfect example of Jesus dying on the cross to give us life, knowing all the while that many of us would never love him back. 

And you know what that tells me? The greatest kind of love comes with the heavy potential of heart-wrenching grief and confusion. And because Jesus loves this way we are now able to emulate and share that love. We can love our family this way. We can love our friends this way. We can love our significant others this way. To love unconditionally means to be relentless about it even when it hurts, even when it’s hard, even when it takes some time. And again, that’s pretty inconvenient! But don’t be afraid of loving that way because it really is the only thing worth fighting for. Plus God did it in a much more severe way, so we definitely should fight for it.

“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.” – 1 John 4:21

For us to really love we must do our best to avoid hate at all costs. You can’t sincerely love God when you hate others because God is incapable of hate towards the people he created. And when you have a relationship with God, He begins a work in you that causes you to grow into his image. Hate just doesn’t match his image. We are actually commanded to love others as an obvious proof of our love for God. What these verses are saying and what I guess I’m trying to voice is: To love God means to love people. And not just the convenient people, but, more importantly, the inconvenient people. He loves us all the same, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t love everyone the same. Yes, even the difficult ones. They actually need it the most.

Oh, and by the way, when we continually operate in love we can virtually do no wrong. Love does no wrong and so follows all of God’s ways.

“Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” – Romans 13:10

Let’s Be Real, Let’s Be Beautiful

To truly experience and spread the love Christ has for us, I’ve found that we’ve got to be transparent; And that means we’ve got to be real.

And ya know what? That’s hard.. and that’s scary. To be real with ourselves and with others means no hiding behind our protective walls of false innocence. That freaks most of us out! We really don’t want people to know where we’ve messed up or what we struggle with on a regular basis. It seems we’d rather develop a front and keep up a performance in public. And that’s ridiculous! We know people aren’t perfect.. we’re people too, so why do we even think for a second that we are expected to be perfect? If anyone has the right to expect perfection from us it’s God, and we know that even He doesn’t.

This is exactly why Jesus came to seek and save us in the first place: Because He knows just as well as us (better than us, actually) how truly imperfect we are. Isn’t it amazing how He loves us despite that?!

This truth should cause us to stop foolishly worrying about what others think of us and in turn be truly transparent with ourselves and with others. We know what God thinks of us and because of the love He has for us, it doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it to do so.

Beyond this we’ve got to allow those around us to be real as well. And that can be just as hard and scary at times. Sometimes we just don’t want to hear about other people’s problems, which is just horrible, but it can be true. We can also fall prey to wanting others to put on a mask of perfection in order to keep those around us from falling into similar temptations. And that’s a major problem, to make others keep their secrets under wraps that is. People can’t really heal and grow without sharing their struggles with others. Plus, trying to protect others who might hear doesn’t really help them either because life is real and we gotta face the fact that stuff happens. It’s really hard to grow without hearing about the potential dangers in life.

So again, let’s be real, and let’s let other people be real.

There are really only two areas where it’s difficult for us to be real, and to allow others to be real:

1. The trials and hardships we face that are emotional and physical like disease, relational problems, and the loss of loved ones.
2. The temptations and sins we are spiritually prone to struggle with on a daily basis.

Both of these categories can be hard to be transparent about. Granted, the first one can be a little easier to express than the latter because when being real in that area you’re really just sharing how you have grown through the trials. In the second category you’re putting yourself in a much more vulnerable position where you can be judged and condemned by those whose heart is in the wrong place. But, ya know, we can’t let that stop us because the Christian faith is not about a performance, but instead giving into God and helping others grow no matter how uncomfortable that can make us.

(Sidenote: When talking about trials we need to avoid doing it with an air of complaining or arrogance because we went through it. And when talking about temptations avoid being nonchalant about sin. These attitudes can help no one.)

Obviously there is some fear involved with bringing yourself to a place of transparency. It really is a big deal to allow yourself to be so vulnerable. And we can’t do it on our own. The overwhelming and relentless love of Christ is the only thing that can enable us to be truly transparent.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment. He who fears has not been made perfect in love.” – 1 John 4:18

The love of the Lord is absolutely perfect and because he dwells in us we possess this perfect love and are capable of loving in the same way! So for us to be real, it means being completely captivated with the love of Jesus.

To really help us be real we just need to look at Jesus, He was the most real person to ever live. I can prove it to you… John 11:35 says, “Jesus wept.” The Bible only speaks of Jesus doing this once, in the chapter of Lazarus’ death and later resurrection induced by Jesus. He wept in mourning for the loss of His friend even though He knew what He would soon do. As the Son of God, He could’ve easily not concerned Himself with such things, but He used real emotions and used them in the most perfect, caring way. Even though God’s Word only tells us of Him literally doing this once, there are other passages that point to Him doing this. And I wouldn’t doubt for a second that He cried in regard to his other friends and the lost.

What I want you to get out of this is that the God of the universe weeps over you, your trials, and your temptations. I know this because He considers each and everyone of us as His beloved children and friends. So in your quest to be transparent, understand that the Savior of the world is your perfect example of being real.

Finally, the world wants real people, the world needs real people. It’s the only thing that can really impact them when it comes to the Gospel. They aren’t impressed with self-righteousness and keeping all the rules, they are impressed with love and the whole idea of being real. To them this is the only thing that’s beautiful, and really it is the only thing that’s beautiful. So, to be real means to be beautiful. It’s what everyone is looking for. It’s something all the Messiah’s followers are called to do and be.

We’ve gotta be willing to tell our story, we’ve gotta be willing to share our trials, we’ve gotta be willing to disclose our temptations. And we’ve got to allow others to do the same. We can even encourage others to tell their story. It’s time to break down our walls we hide behind so we can break down even bigger walls!