I have a confession:
I need to learn to love one another.
Let me explain… I got to spend my first two college summers learning how to share the gospel in some pretty neat places. I’ve learned how to be bold in my witness and not waste relationships made. I’ve learned to quickly turn a conversation into telling the most important thing about me and that is that Christ is my savior because I am a sinner. I’ve learned to take it further than my testimony and quickly share truth about the bible from beginning to end.
To me living out the gospel is sharing the gospel.
It’s being bold and risky.
It’s taking initiative and building relationships.
It’s living out loud so people can hear truth proclaimed and not worrying about the toes that might be stepped on.
Sharing the gospel to me has always been the above list of qualities. And though those are true and those things are needed, I’ve recently realized the list also includes the quality of a simple word I’ve failed to remember to live by, love.
Ya see, anyone can share truth of a bible story and force it into someone’s brain, but if you don’t do it in love… what is it for?
Over this summer I’ve attended more than half a dozen weddings. At each wedding the various handful of preachers spoke on the same scripture: The ever famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. It of course tells us how to act in marriage and what love should look like lived out. However the words of that passage are not only to be applied in a marriage relationship or in a family relationship, instead and most of all the words should be applied towards all people and all situations by people who are in the faith of Jesus Christ.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing,
but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love is a fruit of the Spirit. Love is who Christ is and why Christ was sent.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God,
and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
We love because he first loved us.
1 John 4:7-12, 19
All in all, I desire for love to be perfected in me. I desire to love because he first loved me and lives in me- so that I may share the gospel in its entirety.
Living out the gospel is to love.
