“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” – 1 John 4:7
With so many people out there that need love and care, it can be a bit overwhelming at times. You want to help a lot of people, you want many people to feel loved, but you’re only one person, you can’t always be investing in others, you need some time to love yourself, right?
Or maybe that’s the biggest problem with trying to love other people. Everyone is too obsessed with themselves and loving themselves that they can’t properly love others. Even though it’s popular to say that people need to love themselves better, no one in the history of the world has ever had a problem loving themselves.
There are many different ways that this manifests itself. It’s not just an “I really like everything about myself and because of that am happy.” kind of love, but it’s a selfish love. It’s an “I want things to go my way so that I can feel a certain way. No one does something thinking, “Gee, I sure hope I hate this thing with my whole heart.”
People may be unhappy about themselves, their choices, the way they look, how they act, how they feel, but no one ever actually doesn’t love themselves. Everyone wants to feel good. Even when people harm themselves it’s because they believe doing that will give them more happiness than not doing it. They love themselves and want to do what they want to do.
But what people overlook is that the love that comes to you and the love you show to others is not something of your creation. In fact, there is no true love without God. God is love, therefore, if you have true love it is from God. But I believe many that “love” have a more shallow understanding of what love is.
As humans, we may have times where we can invest in someone for a while without getting anything in return, but even these moments are rare and far between. More likely you love those who in return make you feel good. When you have a best friend growing up, you usually love them (depending on the status of said friendship) but it’s not a strenuous love because the care you are putting into the relationship you are equally getting back from your friend. It’s a mutal benefit of love you might say.
It’s easy to love those who make us feel good, but how do we love people who don’t make us feel good? Or the more common church way of saying it, “It’s easy to love people who are lovable but how do you love people who are unlovable?
When we look at it on our own, it’s actually impossible. We can show short burst of care for this person, but to actually feel love and care for this person, a desire to spend time with them, that can’t come from yourself, that has to have a source much higher than you. Your minor amount of sustainable care is nothing, whereas, through Jesus, you are able to continue loving others that you never thought you could love.
This has become clear to me over the last several months. It’s easy for me to be callous to those who aren’t saved. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t love or care about them. It has only been through Christ that I’m able to show love to others that I never wanted to before.
God is the source of love. Stop pretending like love comes from inside of you. You’re not everything, you know?