How do you love someone you don't like?
How do you love someone you don't like?
November 28 - December 2, 2022 | Always Peachy Devotionals | Walking With Love Week 5
Have you recovered from your food coma yet?
I hope each of you had a marvelous Thanksgiving! My family certainly did. And now our beautiful old farmhouse is all decorated for Christmas, and everything is cozy and wonderful. I just love this time of year.
This study on walking with love has been a challenge for me because love is one of those things none of us really understand completely. It’s too complicated. It’s too nuanced. It has too many meanings and too many translations. There’s a reason why the Greeks had to use five (or more) words for it!
We’ve talked about how to define it and how to show it and how to receive it, and last week was all about gratitude, of course. But this week, we need to get down to brass tacks, as some folks say. This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road, where REAL love stands out and the fake stuff fades away.
Because loving someone doesn’t mean you condone everything they do or say. Loving someone doesn’t mean you let them do whatever they want, no matter the cost. Love isn’t always making someone else happy. That’s not love. That’s laziness. That’s fear taking over your heart and mind and sewing your mouth shut when it ought to be wide open, pleading with them to hear the truth.
But how do you love someone you don’t like? How do you love someone you disagree with? How do you love someone with an agenda that’s dangerous or opposite the Word of God? That’s what we’re going to talk about this week.
November 28 - Pray for your conversations
November 29 - Separate the person from their agenda
November 30 - Speak truth with love
December 1 - Show love (don’t just speak it)
December 2 - Engage intentionally
Love is the most challenging, most difficult, most impossible thing to do. We all need help with it. We all need guidance to do it well. But that’s because it matters so much. Love is bigger and greater than any other aspect of our lives. It’s the difference maker, and it lasts forever, which is our verse for this week, 1 Corinthians 13:13.
Love will outlast everything else in our lives. It outlasts even faith and hope, because eventually we won’t need our faith anymore and then we won’t need hope anymore. But we will always, always need love. How blessed are we that God’s love endures forever?
Let’s ask Him for help and wisdom this week so that we understand the depth of His love, not just for us but for the people we don’t agree with, for the people who are set against Him, and for the people we will have opportunity to speak to.
He loves you. He always will. Don’t ever doubt it. Okay, friend?
Amy
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