1John 3:16-17(The Message)
“This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.”
As Christians, we are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we need to know that what the world teaches is very different from what God teaches us in His Word. The world teaches people to trust in their own truth, but God teaches us in Proverbs 3:5 to trust in Him with all our hearts, and He tells us not to lean on our own understanding. The world teaches people to let their hearts lead them and to do what their hearts tell them to do. God teaches us in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and it is desperately wicked. The world teaches people to be out for themselves and to turn a cold shoulder to others in need. God teaches us to let His love guide us into generosity, compassion, and kindness towards everyone. So, as we can see, we can set ourselves up for a life of disappointment and sadness if we refuse to listen to God and listen to what society says.
God commands us in Ephesians 5:1-2(ESV), “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Imitating God’s character and nature is the way to true love and to living a life that is guided by Him and His Word. This is the way that Christ lived. 1John 3:16 tells us that Jesus Christ lived the reality of real love when he walked upon this earth, and he is our example. He never made God’s love disappear, but freely shared it with everyone. His life is the blueprint that we should follow every moment of each day, but in our modern times, very few individuals are living this way. Single people express how lonely they are, and they dream about what their lives will look like with the right person in them. This is a priority for them, but the real love that God schools us about in 1John 3:16-17 is not on their minds. They’re consumed with the search of finding someone to shower them with love, but they don’t really understand what that means.
There’s a saying that ‘game recognizes game’. This means that I can recognize the game you’re playing because I play the same way. In the context of love, we can derive a bit of wisdom from this. If I desire quality real love, I must first have the capacity to recognize it, and the only way that I can truly recognize it is if I, myself, have given it. So, the truth of the matter is that many of us are praying to receive a kind of love that we haven’t lived, and that’s a problem.
1John 3:16 teaches us about the unconditional love that our Lord and Savior gave to us by giving his life on the cross to save us from the curse of sin. He saved us from an eternity of death, darkness, and destruction. He freely and generously gave so that we could live. This is the true example of what real love looks like; it’s how real love behaves, and through Christ, God has empowered us to love others this way. We can love others, not with our brand of love, but with His brand of love; and that’s a love that never fails. God’s love teaches us that love requires sacrifice, but some of us have never had this realization. We think that sacrificing our bodies and sacrificing our relationship with God will yield something real, when just the opposite is true. We must understand that the kind of sacrifice that love requires is putting God first. It’s helping someone to see and live through the light of Jesus Christ as they witness us living that light before them.
Society teaches that telling a man, “All I need is you”, is very romantic, and it may be, but it is not the truth. It’s a lie and a trick if we fall for it. All we will ever need is God. That’s the truth! Discovering His love transforms us. It’s the most transformative truth there is and will ever be. Love is about what we do and how we live for God. Every moment of our lives should be spent in gratitude for all that our Heavenly Father has done for us. We can bring glory and honor to His name by how we behave when we’re at work, the grocery store, and everywhere else. When we live this all-encompassing love for our Heavenly Father, it means that we understand the price He paid for our freedom, and we are thankful for it in the deepest part of our hearts. Our faith must be expressed through that kind of love, and when it comes to increasing our faith towards marriage, nothing less will do.■
English Standard Version (ESV), The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“All I Need Is You”, written by Kim Times, edited by Fran Mack and K. Stephens for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2023. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!