Perfect Love: Embracing a Life of Radical LoveSample

Love Is a Spirit

Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Romans 5:5 (NKJV)

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love. He gives us the supernatural capacity to forgive, walk in love, and obey God’s commandments, thereby making our faith effective (Galatians 5:6). The Spirit of love keeps bitterness, pride, and other works of the flesh in subjection.

Peter was confident that his natural love for Jesus would prevent him from denying Jesus. Sadly, he failed the test of love. Out of fear, Peter denied Jesus and chose self-preservation (Matthew 26:35; Luke 22:54-62).

After Peter was baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire, super was added to his natural love. By the force of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love, Peter experienced agape love. He did life willing to live and die for the One he once denied (Acts 4:8-9;18-20).

The Holy Spirit does not only empower us to love God more and more in our faith journey. He also empowers us to love people when it is most difficult. He compels us to forgive and constrains us from interacting with people in a manner inconsistent with the nature of love (2 Cor. 5:14). Jesus declares in Luke 6:32 (NKJV), “But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.”

The power to fulfill Luke 6:32 comes with our yielding to the Holy Spirit. Love is the fruit of our intimacy with the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Ponder this powerful account of the Spirit of love at work in the first martyr for Christ:

When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. Acts 7:54-60 (KJV)

It takes love to extend forgiveness at the point of death. Stephen’s experience and words reveal that the Holy Spirit powers the love that forgives. We can only be full of the Holy Spirit by yielding to Him. As we learn to yield our bodies to the Holy Spirit daily, agape love will find full expression through our lives to those who love us and those whose fears and pain cause them to hate us. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love, powers our capacity to love God and people. We love because He first loved us. Alleluia! Keep being filled with the Holy Spirit and yield to His promptings daily.

If you, then, being evil [that is, sinful by nature], know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask and continue to ask Him!” Luke 11:13 (AMP)