Love Like Jesus

“But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”


1 John 4:8



The kind of love that the apostle John writes of in explaining God to us is a love so unlike any other kind of love that once you experience God’s love you are forever changed. God’s love is first pure and holy and is self fulfilling and has no need of reciprocation. Because God is immutable, He needs nothing and He needs no one. Before you think that definition might seem cold and callous, understand that the beauty of God’s love is God’s love is an active kind of love as His love is revealed in His preference. The key word being the word “revealed”. God is a preferring God. He doesn’t need us, He chooses us, and His love for us is not based on need like our love, God’s love is based on want. God want’s something for us.


Try to imagine your life without need, completely satisfied. If you are like me at all you can’t, it’s impossible as we all have tremendous needs. The need for oxygen and food, for water and shelter. The need for companionship and relationship, meaning and purpose, and most of all love. Yes, we need love but it’s not what most of us think when we think of our need for love. There is an old saying that might say it best, “Love isn’t love until it’s given away.”  Our need for love isn’t so that we possess it but rather God created us with the need to give love away. True love is not something any of us sets out to get in this life, true love is what we give to others with no strings attached.


Consider Matthew 22:37-40 where Jesus replied, “‘You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” Jesus was saying the most important thing in life is for people to give love not get love. As we focus on preferring God first and then others today not only will we be loving like Jesus loved, we will experience the deep satisfaction and freedom that God’s agape love provides.


Think about it. The most famous verse in all the Bible says, “For God so loved the world that He gave.” True love and giving are impossible to separate. The most disappointed people in the world today are those who are out looking for love in all the wrong places. They are frustrated because they can’t seem to find love when in reality love is not something we find, it’s something we possess and true love is not something we go seeking but rather its something we go giving. The most satisfied people you will come in contact in this life are those who are living out their days seeking to love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength and are seeking to love their neighbor as themselves. Love is in the giving!


Jesus wasn’t seeking to be loved, He was setting out to reveal God's love and in the process the multitudes loved Him. That’s what I pray you understand about love today. Love really isn’t love until it’s given away because love isn’t something we get, it’s what we possess when we receive Jesus Christ as our personal Savior and Lord so that we have something to offer a world in need. Remember the words of Jim Elliot the American missionary who had these words written in his journal that was discovered after he was killed as he sought to reveal God’s love to an unreached people group, “He is no fool who gives away that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

If you want to live like Jesus today all you need to do is to determine to love like Jesus loved. Measure the success of your day today not by how much make or what you received or accumulated but measure the day by what you were able to give away freely as you prefer others needs over your own. Loving like Jesus begins with being loved by Jesus.



“For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”



Galatians 5:13–14



I LOVE YOU!