Learning To Love

Stats reveal that we really don’t know how to love.  Approximately 50% of marriages end up in divorce.  This does not count the number of couples living together impacting many kids that don’t last.  Ask kids if they are loved, most will say, “no.”  I cannot even look at news or read about news without seeing acidic, toxic hatred prevalent.  We as man do not know how to love.  There is a reason for that.  Without God, we are selfish and really don’t know how to love.

The first several verses in James 4 read as clearly and relevant as if written yesterday:  ¹What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

So, how do we learn how to love?  Let’s take a look 1 John 4 and see what the Bible says. ⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  Love begins with God.  You learn to love by getting to know God.

God illustrates to us the greatest example of all times what love looks like:  ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 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.  God demonstrates what love looks like by sending His only son for us that “we might live through him.”   Jesus became our “at-one-ment” with God.  Through His son’s death, we have the ability to know God.  If you want to truly learn to love, it begins here. 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.

Never-ever forget 1 John 4 ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.  Love begins and ends with God.