1 Corinthians 13:4-7 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; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
I hope you have a lovely peaceful week but just in case you have some challenges, and they come to all of us, where you want to give someone a piece of your mind or you feel like retaliating when someone is unkind or unfair, I thought it would be a good idea to start the week by reminding ourselves of these verses before we say or do anything. So we're starting off the week focusing on God's kind of love and how it affects us.
I don't know about you but I have to confess that in the natural there are times I just don't feel like these verses and unless I understand I can't live up to them in my flesh, I'll feel defeated.
We all know God is love and all of these attributes we've just read are how God loves us and thank God He does! but Romans 5:5 says the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. That means we actually have God's love down in our spirit and when we read verses like that we have to make a decision to believe what it says and take it by faith.
It means the Holy Spirit has placed inside us the ability to be patient and kind, not to be envious, not to behave rudely or be provoked etc. We do have the ability to bear all things, to hope and endure all things but it has to come out of our spirit not out of our flesh. Remember last week we looked at Spirit, Soul and Body and it's out of our spirit man that we walk by faith in the love of God.
When we get irritable and touchy, when we want to get mad or hurt by someone because they've treated us badly it's because we're what the scripture calls carnal, or 'in the flesh'. It's at that point the Holy Spirit will give us a prompting to just hold on a minute and remember that's not who we are any more. He's given us the supernatural love of God in order to deal with it.
We do have God's love down in our spirit and by faith we can make the choice to ask the Holy Spirit for His help to release it. Maybe it will help us if we remember just how much God loves us even when we're unlovely and then we might find it easier to share it with someone else.
My prayer is that we are so aware of how much God loves us this week that it will overflow to others who need it so much too. Amen.
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