Loving The Right Way: How to Love Like God

Loving the right way largely depends on your understanding of what it means to love like God. Different parts of the Bible tell us that love is not an attribute of God, it is who He is.

Love is God’s nature, His personality. So, if we want to love the right way, we must first understand how to love like God. In this post, we will discuss what love is and how we can achieve it.

What is True Love?

Love is one of the most misused words these days. Many people view love through a warped lens, so loving the right way becomes impossible for them. If this is the case, we need to get a clear picture of what true love is. To see true love for what it is, we need to decipher what it isn’t.

There are different kinds of love, all of which were mentioned in the scriptures. Below are the four types of love and what they mean:

• Phileo: This is brotherly love, and it is what we feel for friends, companions, and close acquaintances.
• Eros: This is the romantic feeling or emotion we feel toward a man or woman we are intimate with.
• Storge: This type of love is based on the feelings that we have for family members.
• Agape: This is the God-kind of love that He extends to all.

From the types of love mentioned above, we can see that while love may come with feelings, it is not a feeling. Also, love is not the rush of emotions that you feel when you see or are around someone you are romantically linked to.

True love is the God-kind of love that is expressed to all, as the Bible commands. It is not dependent on emotions or feelings. The scriptures command us to love one another. If this love were based on emotions or feelings, there would be no command. After all, you cannot command emotions or feelings to come upon a person. The Bible gives a clear explanation of what true love is in 1 Corinthians 13.

Loving the Right Way: How to Love Like God

As mentioned earlier, loving the right way means loving like God. Below are three ways to love like God:

Love the unlovely

When God created man, He made him blameless, just like God. However, when man fell in Genesis 3, man became unlovely to God. The Bible says God’s eyes are too holy to behold iniquity. In other words, it means that God must have found it to even look upon us, and we would have become repulsive to Him.

Despite our state, Romans 5:8 says God still loved us when we were still sinners. He loved us so much that He sent His Son to die for us. This shows that God’s love is unconditional and unstimulated by anything that we can do.

In the same way, we shouldn’t love others because of what they can bring to the table. Our love for others should be pure, unconditional, and unforced. There are several unlovely people around us. If God can love us when we are unlovely, then we should love them too.

Be sacrificial

The love that God has for us cost Him is only begotten Son (John 3:16). Imagine you had to sacrifice your only child for someone who committed a crime and should be punished. Even if you loved such a person to the moon and back, like we always say, it would be impossible to make that sacrifice. Yet God did it for you and all of mankind.

True love requires us to be sacrificial. There are times when you will have to go over and beyond for someone else, in some cases, a person who does not deserve it. If you want to love like God, then you should be ready to make that sacrifice.  1 John 3:16 makes it clear that we must be ready to lay down our lives for others as Christ did for us.

Be consistent

It is easy to love others in good times when everything is going smoothly. The challenge lies in loving them when they have hurt us or are inconvenient.

Let’s face it, there are times when it will not be convenient for you to love anyone but yourself. It even gets worse when someone you love hurts you so badly, and you are required to still love them. What do you do when you find yourself in such situations?

God has shown us the perfect example. We hurt Him several times, yet He is ready to forgive us and continue loving us regardless of what we’ve done. 1 John 1:9 says God is faithful and just to forgive. In other words, His love for us is so consistent that He will forgive our errors when we falter. Lamentations 3:22 also mentions that God’s love is steadfast, meaning that it is very consistent. If we are going to love like God, then our love must be consistent in and out of season.

Conclusion

Loving the right way means loving like God, and it is very demanding. We have explained what true love is from God’s perspective and how to love like God. Do you have any questions? Please drop them in the comments section. Visit GodKulture to read other inspirational articles.