Love: A Call to Die

February, it’s the month known for LOVE (Men, don’t stop reading, I promise I won’t get mushy!).  Love, what is it?  When we were younger it was something new and exciting, as you grew perhaps it was something that encompassed a type of playful attraction to a certain someone (maybe you married that certain someone!). But as we continued to grow and mature we realize love is so much more than what we once thought it was.  Love is often a choice, a commitment; it is something that grows over time and usually grows through pain.  It involves sacrifice, and really a dying to oneself (and that’s painful). 

Isn’t that love though, when we learn to die to ourselves for the sake of others?  Instead of exerting ourselves over others, we start serving them.  The relationship becomes about what we can do for them, and not what they can do for us.  Jesus says in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” 

You knew I was going to bring this back to Jesus didn’t you?  Yep, Jesus, He is LOVE. 

 

The Son of God served us, He died for us.  There is no greater love.  Want to start loving people in a sacrificial, selfless way like Jesus did?  Confess you’ve fallen short and you need His help, He will change you.  And once His love for others begins to fill your heart you will realize that learning to love is actually learning to die.  Yet, it’s in death we find life, and life abundantly.  Because once we learn to die to ourselves Jesus does this amazing thing of emptying us of ourselves and filling us with more of Him and His perfect love.