First Thoughts: Loving the Ones You're With

First Thoughts

Series:   Living and Loving As Easter People

Part 3:   Loving the Ones You're With

Text:  1 John 4:7-21

Many years ago the Miles Brothers recorded the song "You Always Hurt the One Your Love."  Take a careful look at the lyrics to this old song. 

         You always hurt the one you love, the one you should not hurt at all;

         You always take the sweetest rose, and crush it till the petals fall;

         You always break the kindest heart, with a hasty word you can't recall;

         So if I broke your heart last night, it's because I love you most of all. 

The Miles Brothers were on to something with this song.  When we get close to someone and seek to truly love as Christ loved, the enormity of the call to love become even more apparent.  Love in the abstract is always easy.  Loving up close and personal is amazingly hard. 

Why do you always hurt the one you love?  Consider the following suggestions.

1.  The closer you get to a person you begin to see how that persons interests, tastes, life experience, values, and overall view of life differs from your own.  At that point, there is a strong tendency to back away from that persons because you worry that the differences too great for you to overcome.

2.  When you grow close to a person and share invest much more of your real self in that relationship, you become more vulnerable.   The  attitudes and actions of the one you love  become much more important to you.  A harsh word or judgmental comment will hurt you much more deeply.  When hurt, the natural tendency is to distance yourself from the person whose words, often said in hast without any real malice, hurt you so deeply.

3.  Loving others requires a personal commitment that forces you to make some very hard choices .   Loving requires your presence and availability to that person.  It's not enough to say "You were always on my mind."  You have to be there for them.  You have to care for them.  You have to give of yourself to maintain that relationship. You have to keep the promises you have made to that person or the trust that hold you together quickly disappears

4.  True love requires a spiritual connection with God who is love.  The closer you are to others the more you realize there is a spiritual component to all relationships.  A mystical connection with and through God's Spirit  is needed to maintain loving relationships.  The energy and unction to love comes from God who is pure love.  It is God's Spirit within us that gives us this need to love and be loved. It is God's Spirit that places deep within the very fiber of our being the passionate need to experience the unity and oneness of all things. 

In the end, only love remains.  Why? Because God is love and His love is eternal.  In His love, God gave us life. Through the witness of His Spirit, he sustains our lives and all creation.  We love God because He first loved us.  Through Jesus, God choose to get up close and personal with us.  He choose not to condemn but to love us. He loved with the force of his whole being to the point of death. Yet, that death gave birth 

Loving others is hard. It is the hardest thing on earth to do. Yet, in the end, we must love for only love lasts.  When we make the decision to love we move closer to God. Love changes everything.  In the holy space between us and those we love, God's Kingdom comes!