I hear a lot of talk these days about loving. I hear people saying the church needs to do better at loving others. I hear people saying the world needs more love and not hate. Though I fear that loving someone and just accepting anything they want to do or any way they want to live their life has been greatly confused.

I hear people saying the church is full of hate and hypocrisy. And though I don’t doubt that there are those who may be, do we really have to agree on everything someone says or does in order to truly love them. Did Jesus love everyone? Yes! Did He agree with everyone? No!

So let’s look today at love and at how Christ loves us and how we can love others the way He does.

The first thing I want to establish is that we only know how to love because He first loved us. it is His love for us and in us that enables us to love well; not with a human kind of love but with a God (agape) kind of love.

Now the issue here is you have to first receive God’s love. You have to first believe that HE loves you before you can truly understand His love or expect to be filled with His love. So you must do away with any religious notions that you have to be good enough or do something to be lovable by God.

God loved you before Christ came. God has always loved you. God loved you, and that is precisely WHY Christ came. But you have to settle in your heart that HE loves you if you truly want to experience His love.

You can’t truly love until you receive God’s love.

So the work of Holy Spirit is to fill us with this same love that the Father and the Son had from the beginning. The same love that caused Father to send His Son. The same love that caused Jesus Christ to lay down His life. The same love that raised Him from the dead and it is the same love that has saved us!

You can’t earn the love of God, you can only receive it.

God’s love isn’t earned, it is deserved, it isn’t gained, it is freely given to all because God is love. He loves His creation. And by His Holy Spirit, He pours out His love on all hearts that will receive.

God’s love is poured into our hearts, or shed abroad as KJV puts it, and fills those who will believe and receive. John also says that he had come to know and to believe the love of God. It is important that we do not just know about God’s love but that we believe that He loves us, receive this love, and allow Holy Spirit to fill us with God’s love. Then John also makes some very hard statements concerning love.

You can’t go around saying you love God while hating others. This is not the way of Christ. The walk of love requires supernatural love in our hearts. That is why we need the work of Holy Spirit in us!

There is much about loving the brothers and sisters in the faith written through the New Testament. Many scriptures point to how we should be toward one another. But I want to look at what Jesus said about the way we should love if we are truly followers of Him and His teaching of the Kingdom of God. Because I have heard people say such silly things of loving someone but not liking them. This is completely different from what Jesus said. And honestly, to love the way Jesus told us to love will cost us something.

Jesus has called His followers to an unnatural kind of love because it is supernatural and takes supernatural power.