What Is Your Love Like?

The love of God is so deep and free and beautiful. It goes beyond any love we may have known. To begin to grasp what God’s love is like, we simply need to become open. Have you ever stopped to ask God to reveal His love to you in a deeper way?

Often our perception of love is formed through our human interactions and are not accurate interpretations of what true love is. Someone may have promised us unconditional love and then required that we pay in some way for the affection, protection, and even comfort that we received. Perhaps love was a reward for accomplishing a list of rules or expectations. Achievement-based love is always performance driven and can fuel a perfectionist spirit that hinders us from receiving the love God has given to us. Those in our lives may even have abused us in the name of love. The word “love” was God’s word first, so He gets to have the first and final say.

Invite Him to give you a new perspective today. Ask, God, would You give me a picture of what Your love looks like?

When we discover what God’s love is really like, it causes us to come alive in a new way. Throughout Jesus’ time on earth, He had encounters with people just like us. These encounters help us to see who God is and how He really feels about us.

We don’t often picture Jesus in this way, but in one biblical account, the apostle John tells us that Jesus was “wearied from His journey” and stopped to sit down by a well in Samaria. Now, this is one of the most unlikely places for Him to ever visit, because Jews avoided the Samaritan people at all costs. A woman from Samaria came at that very moment, one of the hottest times of the day, to draw water. Jesus asked her for a drink. I love how she so honestly speaks her mind. Seriously, what is this man thinking? This was Jesus’ in. He offered her living water.

Once she expressed her desire for this living water, Jesus confronted a very personal area of her life, her relationship with men. His love would not let her stay hidden. He knew her. He knew her past and the situation she was currently in. She was aghast and tried to compose a response. Jesus was not deterred. Instead of telling her she needed to leave these men, He chose to focus on her spirit, what she was created for. His Father is seeking people to worship from their spirit and from a place of honest truth. He wanted her to know that coming as she was and being real about her current situation was the only requirement for a life-giving relationship with the Living God. She left her water jug right there and ran into the city, telling everyone about this man and how He had treated her. Don’t you just love her response? Because of her authentic testimony, many people believed and came to Jesus and began a relationship with Him.

From Jesus’ encounter with this woman from Samaria, we see that:

• His love stops for us.
• His love confronts the truth in us.
• His love promises more than we have known.
• His love makes us come alive.

If you have never seen how His love has reached out to you before, now is the time to start.

Jesus wants to encounter you just as He did with the woman from Samaria as she was going through her everyday life. Think of something that you do in your normal daily routine.

Ask Jesus, Where are You when I am…?

What is something I do that makes You smile?

Is there an area of my life that You want to talk about?

How can I open my heart more to receive Your love?

Personal Application: Look at 1 Corinthians 13. Write down the ways that love manifests itself (i.e. through patience, kindness, gentleness, etc.). Next to each word, identify ways or times when you experienced the love of God.