The Loving Christian

One of the signs of a true Christian is a person that sincerely loves others with no thought about himself. It’s that brother or sister from church that always has a smile on their face, a sincere smile, it is the person that is always ready to help others, and to make a sacrifice for the person next to them even if they do not know each other very well.

True love is good and pure, and there is one other thing about it, it can only come from God. It can only show itself when Christ is the one that is in complete charge of the Christian. When we try to give it from our own strength, we will fail miserably, because only the Lord is the one capable of giving true love, we can’t with our sin riddled bodies.

The very first thing that we have to love in our Christian life isn’t the people about us, before anything else, we have to love God, and not in just any fashion, we have to love Him with our whole heart.

Jesus said unto him thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
We have to put God first in our lives, before our family, before our friends, before anything else that we might have, it is not always that easy, it is very hard to let go of some things because God has asked it of you, but everything in us must be tuned to loving the Lord and putting Him first, before anything else that we might have. After all He does it all for our own benefit!

"If ye love me, keep my commandments…He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." John 14:15, 21

We are to love God with everything that is in us, this is not only the right thing to do for the One that saved us, it is also a direct commandment of God; we are being obedient to Him when we love Him, when we are in submission to God, and because of our love for Him we are obedient in serving him. Christ then has the chance to make something wonderful out of our lives, it is then that He can start the molding and shaping of our lives that will be ultimately for His glory.

When we have the true love of God showing through our lives it does not always mean that we will be in the spotlight, praised for the way we are living and so on! We should not get any praise out of the matter…all the praise and all the glory belong to God that is why we are here to begin with.

The true love of God being made manifest in our lives does not only make our relationship with the Lord better, it also prepares us for a life of service and gets us through the times when it seems that there is nothing left to look forward to. It is the best way to go through life because not only does it bring you closer to your Savior, it also allows people to see Christ in you; when a person sees that something about you is different, when they see that you can go through things and do things with a smile on your face and with that something just shining out of you the whole time, what they are seeing is the love of God in you. They are also seeing Christ in you, because along with a true love for God comes a state of complete humbleness and obedience before God that allows Christ to start working in your life and in the lives of others through you.

"And though I have the gift of prophecy, and the understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith so that I could move mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2

We can put on a good show and bluff a lot of people but if we do not have the love of God working on our lives we are nothing, as the verse says above. We are absolutely nothing. May we all have the love of God in our lives forever!