Survival Guide To True Love

I'm sure this blog's title threw you off a little. I hope it did, at least. Because this "survival guide" is going to be much different than your typical guide to love. I'm not here to talk about boyfriend/girlfriend love. I'm not here to talk about child/parent love. And I'm not here to talk about Mom/Dad love. No. I'm here to talk about true love. And how we can strive to walk in that with everyone, from strangers to close friends to family members to our enemies.

So here we shall start our journey, together, at what true love is. And to begin, we can look in 
1 Corinthians 13.


If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.  Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.  Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always "me first," Doesn't fly off the handle,  Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always,  Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.


So that's easy enough, right?  The past week it has been on my heart to start a blog series on love, and that's just what I intend on doing. Love is all of the above and so much more. That's true love. And that's the love I'm going to explore with you over the next few days. Buckle your seat belts, because we're in for a ride. I'm so excited, because God's love, true love, is something we all need!


Excited! Inspired! Thrilled!
Daddy's Girl

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