Unconditional Love
Thursday's Devotion (1-18-07)
"This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you." John 15:12 (KJV)
The Lord commands us to love one another as He has loved us. I want to focus on that one part for a moment, "...as I have loved you." How does God, how does His Son Jesus Christ love you? Unconditionally! Too many of us (Myself included at times,) only love when it's easy to do so. We have to stop fooling ourselves, and realize that we need to love those who aren't so easy to love as well. The lady at work that keeps causing you trouble, the boy at school who harasses you, the ex-spouse that cheated on you and the list goes on. Whatever the person did to you, you have to put that aside and love them anyway. If God would've only loved us when we were easy to love, then we would not have a chance of salvation through His Son! The Bible says that while we were yet enemies of God, His Son died for us. He still loved us even though we were sinners (enemies of God.) So, it is simply not good enough to love those that love you.
The reason I wrote on this subject today was because I was reminded of one of Creflo Dollar's messages that I was watching like a couple of weeks back or so. He also made a very good point - That the people who are hard to love are that way because they don't have enough love in their lives, and we need to give them that love. That made a lot of sense to me. The example I'm going to give probably isn't a very good one, but I'm going to give it anyway: I remember when I was like 15 or so, and my friends and I went onto this program called, "Paltalk." It's a voice chat system online. The first several chat rooms we went into on this program weren't too friendly to us to say the least. So, what came out of this situation? We just started a rampage on there... We started going from chat to chat just running all of the people out, yelling profanities and what not. I remember at times in certain chat rooms people would message me privately and kill me with kindness. So, what would I do? I would make up the excuse to my friends, "This room isn't worth our time, let's go." That was my way of cutting that person a break and not giving them anymore trouble. That's probably not the best example, considering it's an online example, but it's the only one that I can think of at the moment. The point is that people are hard to love because they weren't loved, and when they are loved that changes everything. I didn't stop doing that kind of stuff until I found the love of God in my life. All I ever wanted was what everyone wants - To be loved, and God's love is unconditional and ours should also be towards others.
Prayer: Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this message and for all things. Please forgive us of all our sins as we forgive all those who've wronged us. Help us to love others unconditionally, and help your light to shine through us. May we draw many more souls to your throne. Just perfect us in your love. In Jesus name. A-men!
God bless