Follow Love like a candle,
like a star,
like the only light
in a midnight wilderness …
Follow Love like a treasure map
through dangerous lands
far beyond your comfort
and wildest dreams …
Leave everything but Love behind.
Follow Love like the sound of running water
in the desert.
When you’re lucky enough to find
that life-giving source of all that is good,
stay close.
Follow Love like a golden river winding
through day and night,
heartache and joy,
forgiveness and grief,
your biggest fears…
Follow Love like the only hope,
the only way out,
the only solid ground,
the only thing worth living
and dying for.
Follow Love all the way to the end
and the beginning,
then start again through the mystery of faith
into the timeless,
open sea
of infinite adventure,
which is the eternal life
God has planned for you.
Every spiritual tradition across the world agrees on one thing: the power of love. In 1 John 4:8, we learn “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
Isn’t that a beautiful thought? God is love.
In Matthew 22:36-40 when asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus said “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
So the question is: How can we love better? How can we truly recalibrate our lives to make love our top priority? How can we begin to love God above all created things?
Other than Jesus, none of us is capable of perfect love, but we can all grow in our capacity to love by prayerfully contemplating the concept of God’s love and praying for the grace to grow in our capacity to love like He does.
It helps to focus on scripture passages like 1 Corinthians 13:
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
“The greatest of these is love.” Isn’t that another gorgeous thought from the word of God?
There is infinite wisdom to be discovered in the biblical descriptions of love. I encourage you to explore them all for yourself, and spend some time in silence contemplating God’s great love for you, allowing awareness of it to permeate your being.
How have you experienced God’s love in your life? What choices have you made out of love, and what have been the result of those choices? Comment below, and I will be delighted to keep you in my thoughts and prayers.
Lord, “we love because You first loved us.” Give us the grace to love well. Help us to understand the infinite power of Your love for us, and give us the courage to be guided by the immensity of Your great loving plan for our lives. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
Written by Nicky Gant for http://www.uniteinprayer.org 3/21/2019