Two Ways God Is Interested in Your Love Life

Does God have plans for your love life? Yes! He does! However, you might find that His focus might be a little different than where ours tend to go this time of year.

Number One – Love God

In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, we read that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and strength.  Not only that – we are to remind ourselves daily of our love for Him.  That is because, quite frankly, we (people in general) tend to fill our minds with a whole lotta distractions and not make room to focus on loving God.

Jesus repeated this in Matthew 22:37-38: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.” Anything else you do in life will be in vain, if you don’t start here.  Jesus then lead into my next point when He said “And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Number Two – Love Souls

To love another person, you need to change your perspective from seeing that person driving next to you, your co-worker, your sister, that cashier, and I could go on and on, to seeing souls.  Strip off the title and see a soul that God created and Jesus died for.  While God has given specific ways in which to show that love (Matthew 19:19/Leviticus 19:18) He explains that each of those actions start with a decision to love that soul (Romans 13:8-10).

Yes – that means the person with a different skin color than you.  The person who dresses different than you.  The person who doesn’t smell all that good.  The person who wasn’t raised like you were.  The person who is nice to you and…

the person who doesn’t love you.

It is easy to love those who show it back, but if we are to be Christ – Imitators, we must do the hard stuff.  “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you…” (Matthew 5:44)

How do we do this?

Well, sorry to break it to you, but there is no easy button for love. In fact, love is a decision we make and a process we strive to improve at for the entirety of our lives.  Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:1-6, that we change our attitudes, and work on our patience so that we may walk worthy of being called a Christian.

Why Should You Love?

While I could probably go into immense detail as to all the reasons to love God and the souls around us, the reason to love can be simple summed up to:  Love because God loves us – flaws and all.  ^“For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8).

How can we possibly look at another human being and see them as anything other than amazing when God looked at us while we slapped His love away with our sin, and loved us anyway?  So yes, God is concerned with your love life.  He raised the bar, and expects us to humble ourselves and do the hard stuff.