Brave To Love

What’s Love Got To o With It?

Well quite frankly, everything.

We live in world filled with what about me people. We live in a world where even those with prestigious jobs and ivy league education can not manage to treat each other with a basic level of decency. In fact, it seems like the more news you watch the more the real it becomes we are a world that no longer seems to have a basic level of decency or humanity.

Sometimes I wonder if the news just doesn't report these stories. I mean, I know good people. I know people that would give you the shirt off their back. I know people that go out of their way to help others. SO why does it seem these occurrences are isolated? Why is there nothing but hate, anger and bitterness being reported?? Could it be that love takes bravery? Sometimes I think it does.

It’s always been easier to go with the flow, to do what everyone else is doing. It’s true is fashion, music, style, everything has a trend. Has a popular season. Poodle skirts and bobby socks were once the outfit to be seen wearing. And then bell bottoms and guys with shaggy hair and beards was cool. At one point, smoking was a socially accepted and allowed way of life. You could smoke anywhere! In the office, at a restaurant, even at hospitals!! Can you believe that that was once “ok.”

Nowadays, in most cities you can not smoke anywhere indoors. You can not smoke within so many feet of a hospital and most businesses. Smoking went from being groovy to being nasty. How about tattoos. Now there’s a controversial subject. We have an entire generation that can not stand tattoos and never will. And we have another generation that gets tattoos like every other week. I could go on and on on the fads through the years but my topic today is love. When did love go out of style? When did it become not only socially acceptable but praise worthy to be rude, mean and nasty to people?? When did it become a thing to treat people with such hostility and be rewarded for it and be punished for being nice?

1 John 2:7–11 NIV

7 Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. 8 Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. 9 Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. 10 Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. 11 But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.

John

John 13:34–35 NIV

34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 15:12 NIV

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

Ephesians 5:2 NIV

2 and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Ephesians 5

1 John 4:10–21 NIV

10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. 13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

1 John 4:10

1 Corinthians 13 NIV

1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.