The Lord has me focusing on His love this month, and so I’ve been taking the time to really ask myself what is God’s love? Do I have God’s love in my heart? Am I showing what God’s love is to others?
As I’m reading the scriptures and letting them sink in, I find that I’m getting really encouraged by it! I’ve taken some of the take-aways and listed them here to encourage us in remembrance of the God kind of love.
God’s Love Accepts me
Sometimes to this day I have to recalibrate my thoughts and remember that my value and identity isn’t tied to other things outside of God. Because we live in a world where there is so much messaging around stereotypes and what is right and wrong based on society’s thoughts, we can sometimes get caught up in misplacing our identity. The next thing we know we have to recalibrate and remember that we aren’t approved or validated by things like people, jobs, degrees, etc.
Reading about God’s love was a good reminder for me that I am enough. I am accepted already and I don’t have to earn the approval or validation for things in my life. At work we don’t have to prove ourselves if God sent us. In life we don’t have to prove that we are capable of things when our trust is in a God whose love already makes us capable! God’s love approves of our callings and assignments for Him before other people even notice us doing them.
Looking to people or external things to define or approve us belittles the authority God has in our lives and gives it away to that thing we’re looking to for validation. God wants us to trust that He means what He says when He speaks about us:
We are called
We are approved
We are anointed
We are enough
We are capable
Obedience to God
“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” John 14:15 NASB
The other thing that I am reminded of over these last couple weeks is that we can show God that we love Him by being obedient to Him. If we love God we keep the commands He has for us in our personal lives and in the written word.
I was thinking about my life before I gave it to Christ, and how I would say that I believed in God. I would say those things but I didn’t live for Him, I didn’t really go to church, and my life wasn’t aligning to His word. Even though I said I believed in God, my actions didn’t really show that I loved Him.
My pastor teaches us that biblical faith in God is not just believing something in your mind but action is accompanied with what you believe from your heart. How many of us are living lives that say we believe in God but nothing in our lives shows that we are His or that we love Him? What areas in our lives are we just saying with our mouths that Jesus is Lord in our lives but we don’t show any fruit of it?
Perfect Love Casts Out Fear
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.” 1 John 4:18 NASB
Lastly, 1 John 4:18 was related to me in a new way. When looking at it along with the description of nothing being able to separate us from the love of God in Romans 8, I realized there is so much life in this God kind of love!
The love of God casts away all negative things in our lives. It casts away debt, it casts away lies, it casts away COVID-19, it casts away failure, it casts away danger, it casts away anxiety, sickness, and more. In all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:37) !
I realized that through the love of God we literally can’t lose. We always have the victory. We have no choice but to be triumphant because of the love of God in our hearts. No fear or anything that’s contrary to our faith in God can win in our lives!
I hope this has encouraged you as it has encouraged me. I’m so thankful to be His daughter!
Scriptures About Love
- Romans 8:31
- Romans 8:35
- Romans 8:37-39
- 1 John 4:8
- 1 John 3:16
- 1 Corinthians 13