DAILY DEVOTIONAL – April 21, 2021
“What’ Love Gotta Do With It?”
Prayer: Our Loving Heavenly Father, thank You for Jesus. Amen.
Scripture: 1 John 4:7-11
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Devotional – “What’s Love Gotta Do With It?”
Love. What is love? I would be willing to bet that there are as many definitions of love as there are people listening to or reading this devotional. Love is difficult to describe. No one person is the same and no relationship is the same. Each of us has associated very different experiences with this word love.
The reason we have such a hard time defining true love, is because none of us are capable of it. All of us are sinful and corrupt in our hearts no matter how hard we try. If we are honest with ourselves and each other, our love fails. Ultimately, true love loves, and expects nothing in return. True love loves even when it hurts, it loves those who disagree and who hate, it loves selflessly and it loves unconditionally.
If we have any hope of knowing true love and experiencing true love, then true love must reveal itself to us. True love must love us first. And that, my friends, is why we call the news of Jesus Christ Good News! True love has revealed Himself.
While a fallen humanity struggles to define love by what it feels like, the Bible defines love in three simple yet powerful and life-changing words. As John says in our text for today, “God is love.” Love is not a feeling or an emotion. Love is not an experience or fulfillment of human expectations. Love, is not something we do at all. Love, true love, is God. God is love. We only know what love looks like because of what God has done for us. As John says in verse 10, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
God is love my friends, and God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whosever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
No matter what your experiences with, my prayer for you is that by faith in Christ you realize that love has found you! The God who is love does love you and has revealed Himself to you! As Jesus told Phillip in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
We will never find true and everlasting love in anything or anyone in this world. The love our souls long for and the love that gives life is found in a relationship with Jesus Christ alone, who has promised, “I am with you until the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
Remember, that God loves you, that He has forgiven yesterday, that He is with you today and that He has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
