God Speaking

“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

(Leviticus 19: 18)

We are studying a fascinating topic in our Bible study at my church. We are delving into the characteristics of God and if we are to be an image of him here on earth how do we do we practice his characteristics.  Last week we were exploring his love and John tells us he is the supreme definition of love. 

“God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God and God in him.” (1 John 4: 16)

The beginning of the study was to discover what the word, love, means. The word in English is casually used in all sorts of ways, we can say we love chocolate and at the same time tell a loved one how much we love them. In Scripture written in Greek, different words are used for different types of love. Relationships are very important for humans and lack of human contact can cause serious emotional results. The Heavenly Father wanted us all to understand this and gave us all this law, Love One Another. 

In our study we looked at the different Greek words used for different relationships, there is one to describe romantic love, one for love between brothers and sisters, one for parental love. All these are important, but the most powerful word is attributed to God. This word is Agape. This is the perfect love described by John in his first letter. Our task was to discover how we as humans could a deeper understanding of this and practice in our everyday life style so our image of this will show in our relationships. 

Agape is an active love. God doesn’t just say he loves us, he shows us over and over how he loves us. He forgives us, he is willing to listen to us whenever we want to. He protects us when we call out for help. He is our rock we can lean on. He has given us his word so we can get to know him. We can never achieve this perfect love he has, but we can learn from it, so our love becomes active not just telling someone we love them but showing them by our actions. When Jesus was telling his disciples how to do this, he says these words. 

“A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.” (Luke 6: 40)

God’s word is the source we can turn to when we want to learn how to represent this beautiful characteristic of God’s and our teacher is the Holy Spirit, he is called Counsellor. We also need to keep in close contact with our Heavenly Father so that Agape envelopes us so our relationship with loved ones, friends and even those difficult people, becomes more active and represents who we serve, spending time in prayer and reading his word, helps us absorb this incredible love.