Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
A devotion by Stephen Long
If you love someone, you will put up with a lot. I have seen the mothers of special children show the greatest patience with their children, even far after a spouse has long ago pulled away because he “just can’t deal with it.”
Love doesn’t give up on somebody after the first and second offense. It is capable of forgiving seventy times seven.[i]
God’s kind of Agape love is about loving for what you can contribute to another’s life regardless of what they do for you. The only one who has ever successfully loved this way is the Lord Jesus Christ, but with the Holy Spirit within us and filling us, we can grow more into this kind of lover.
What kind of person would we observe who loved like this? How would we recognize an Agape kind of lover?
It is the man who forgoes his career to stay at home with his invalid wife. It is the farmer who goes and harvests his injured neighbor’s crop for him. It is the prominent citizen who goes out of his way to speak to the boy with an intellectual disability. It is the policeman who responds to an emergency call from a well known criminal.
Agape love is giving credit to someone else when you know that you also contributed heavily to the success of a project. It is downplaying the flaws of others, knowing that you have plenty of your own.
Love thinks well of others, speaks well of others and treats others as you would have them treat you.
Love will never be jealous of the success of others even if you have competed for the same prize. It will never wish any less blessing or more trouble upon another. It will never say, “They don’t deserve that” when something good happens to another; and it will never say, “They deserved that” when something bad happens to someone else.
The person who loves will not push one’s self up to the front of the line. It will not bully people but it will confront those who do bully others. Love will not allow us to grab the spotlight while shoving others out. Love focuses first on the Lord Jesus and then upon the indivuals around us. It never says "What shall be done for the man whom the king delights to honor?" and "Whom would the king delight to honor more than me?" [ii]
Love will not “think of himself more highly than he ought to think,”[iii] but will also look out “for the interest of others.”[iv] Love is not like the pufferfish, blowing yourself up thrice your own size to impress but will think soberly – realistically. It is not making yourself look smaller than you really are but neither is it making yourself look bigger.
We could use a few more good manners these days. It seems like we’ve lost so much of what we once had attained as a civilized society. Love will help us do that.
Love looks out for others as well as it looks out for one’s self. It doesn’t become easily provoked nor does it think the worst of others but gives a fellow human being the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
Love is full of joy. There is joy when another succeeds as much as when you succeed. There is joy in the blessing of others as well as when you are blessed. There is joy when truth is spoken – the full truth. It rejoices in the truth that “the wages of sin is death,” but also in the truth that “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
This is just a start, but that’s what love is. And, if you really want to see true love, don’t look at all of us flawed humans around you; look at God – and the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ who loved you so much he came to a lousy sin cursed world to be one of us and die for our sins. This is love.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
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