This Is Love

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This Is Love
1.29.25 [1 John 4:9-10] River of Life (February Video Devotional)
February is known for many things. It’s the shortest month. It’s the hardest month to spell. But it’s best known as the month of love. The signs are everywhere. Chocolates and candies. Cards and flowers. Valentine’s Day serves as the tentpole for tender love. 
Our world loves to talk about love. To sing about love. But it seems like we’ve reached a point where love is thrown around so much, it’s hard to know what love really is. 
Many claim love makes the world go round. It sounds good. But what real impact does love have our on world? It’s hard to find love in the headlines. And it’s not just a modern struggle. Love drives the plot of fairy tales, but not history books. Pride, hatred, and greed seem to have shaped our world more than humility, love, and generosity. 
Yet we still crave love. We want to be loved. We want someone to love. And maybe that’s why we spend so much energy thinking and talking and singing about love. We want love to be meaningful. Real. 
In order for love to be meaningful, it must have real substance. It must move from the fuzzy realm of feelings and thoughts to real words and actions. True love does just that. The Apostle Paul famously sketches out what love is and isn’t in 1st Corinthians 13
These words have been imprinted upon the conscience of our culture. How many of these sentences can you finish? Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not proud. Love does not dishonor others. Love is not self-seeking, nor easily angered. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil. Love rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. 
It is a lovely sketch of tender true love—how love thinks, talks, acts, and reacts. True love lives for another in every sense. 
Because of true love’s other focus, true love draws hard lines in the sand to protect and defend its beloved. There are ways it will not think. It will not keep a running record of slights. It will not teeter on the brink of implosion. True love rejects envy—desiring what someone else has—because it already has the very best. True love refuses to sweat the small stuff because it is focused on the bigger picture. True love rejects deception in all forms: distortions, half-truths, and manipulative behavior because truthfulness and trust are its north star.
True love is devoted to doing things the right way, even when that’s the hard way. Love makes painful sacrifices rather than taking shortcuts. Love shines in the light of day rather than hiding in the shadows. True love is willing to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait some more. Not because true love loves sitting around, but because true love is in it for the long run. 
True love takes the long view on life. Cheap thrills aren’t true love’s cup of tea. True loves chooses tough conversation today rather than deep disappointment down the road. Love is always thinking about and investing in the future.
True love is principled, passionate, and persistently other-oriented. 
This is the kind of love that’s worth thinking and singing about. It’s the kind of love that all people crave. But is it the kind of love we show? Can you read 1 Corinthians 13 and replace your name with the word love? 
You don’t need to call up your loved ones to find out. You already know that you struggle with impatience and envy, anger and pride. You already know that at times you do keep a record of all the ways you’ve been wronged. There are too many moments when our love fails. 
But true love is out there. Not just as a concept. Not on some fancy greeting card or just in fairy tales. True love took on substance and made real sacrifices. Here’s what John tells us. This is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. The love that we all crave, the love we are all looking for and hoping for is found in God himself. The signs are everywhere. God is patient and kind. He blesses us with so many good things in our lives. He finds no joy in any kind of evil because he knows it only and always leads to eternal suffering, separation, and devastation. Yet, he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. God is not easily angered or self-seeking. In fact, in love he seeks us out. 
That’s why he sent us his Son. Jesus invites us to come to him with our sins, our shame, and our guilt and to be cleansed, healed, and restored. He rejoices in truth and speaks the truth to us in love. He loved us enough to live for us. To die for our sins. To rise again and assure us that he has remodeled the grave from a frightening pit into the gateway to eternal glory.  
God’s love, the truest love this world has ever known, never fails. And that kind of love is what we, and everyone in our world, need most, this month and for the rest of time. 
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