About a year ago, like any guy hungry for love, I asked God to prepare my heart for my future wife because I wanted my heart to be in the right place with my understanding of love, especially before I got in a relationship with someone. I wanted something more than 1 Corinthians 13. I wanted to fully understand what loving someone with my heart fully focused on God was like. My heart was hungry for all of this; however, God showed me a greater love. He showed me the type of love I needed to focus on.
I know very well that I am first supposed to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). I have always known that, and I have always tried my best on all of that, but I don’t think I ever took it to heart like I did for preparing my heart for being in a relationship. Then one day it hit me: "He wants me to work on something else that is even more important." It was basically God saying “Yo chill your heart, I need you to do this for me because this is better.”
He was telling me I needed to take loving others more seriously than I was taking getting ready to love someone else.
I think especially as young Christians we get so caught up in finding our future spouse or being in a relationship with someone that we lose focus on the real love that we are supposed to have for not one person but every person. Jesus didn’t say just love the person you are dating, he said to love everyone. Yes, even your ex, and other people in this world you may not really like at the moment.
We yearn to love God and also love a person deeply, but what about loving people who are LGBTQ or Muslim or that person that made your life difficult? These are the type of people that it has seemingly gotten harder for Christians to love for some reason. I think it’s easy to miss the mark on all of that because many voices around you, especially for Christians, can easily steer you to think that you are loving those people when all you are really doing is condemning them for their sin. There is no condemnation in love. John 3:17 says, “For God did not send his Son into the world to Condemn the world, but to save the world through him."
My sin is not greater than anyone else’s because we all are imperfect people, that is why God sent the perfect person to die for the imperfect people that we are. If we want people to see the love of Christ we must show them in the right manner. Jesus never yelled at people for sinning and told them that they were going straight to hell, he showed them true love and compassion. That is what we must do also if we are to love others.
It eventually came down to this for me: If I cannot love everyone, then how can I love one person fully?
If I got married and had the strongest spiritual relationship with my wife and loved her very deeply but yet still had hatred towards many other people in my life, I would be a hypocrite. If we want to love someone for the rest of our life, we also have to be able to love everyone else for the rest of our life.
There will always be road bumps, there will always be times where we struggle to love others, but it is through Christ we are given the ability to love everyone. He gives us that peace that Paul writes about in Colossians 3:15: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts." The bottom line is that if we really want to love one person, we have to have our hearts set on the greater purpose ahead of that: to love everyone. We are supposed to be here for each other no matter the circumstances. Galatians 5:13 says we are called to “serve one another humbly in love.” That is what we must do before we can even think about loving one person fully.
This is what God is currently teaching me, and I am nowhere near the best at doing it. However, what God did was take the focus off of what my heart wanted and instead put it on what my heart needed. I am now so content with the love that I am being taught and showed and I really hope that it can rub off on many people in this world all for God’s glory.
That is what God does, that is the evidence of God’s true love because God’s love never fails.
I love you all even though it may be hard for me to love some of you, I promise I am growing in this love God is teaching me.
