Love with No Return

           

  “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.” (1 Corinthians 13:4- THE MESSAGE)

These verses are very familiar to most. It’s a description of love, a description of what we are supposed to be as Christians. I don’t know about you but when I see all of that, I get discouraged. How am I supposed to look like that? I can’t do it. To love anyone like that would be completely impossible. 

Our world’s view about love when it comes to friendships or any kind of relationship is the mindset that “I can only pour out as much as I am going to get back from you.” This sounds like it would work, except that in reality, rarely does any relationship have a perfect balance of give and take. Someone will end up burnt out. Someone might need more than you can give or vice versa. It just simply doesn’t work. 

When you think about it, all God does is give. He gives, and gives, and gives, and doesn’t ever expect something back. Wouldn’t that be such a burden if he did expect something back? I believe this is the way God intended us to be. “To love with no return.” But how can we do that?

In the earlier verses in 1 Corinthians 13, it says this.
           

“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.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3 THE MESSAGE)
            

Being bankrupt is such a great picture of what we look like when we have nothing left to give, when we’ve given all we had and completely emptied ourselves and become burnt out because our source of love has been drawn from the wrong things. In order to give, we have to continually be filled, or we will go bankrupt. People or relationships can temporarily fill us but, eventually, we will be back at the same place, empty. Not many of us can say that we only draw our confidence, love, and validation from Christ – but this is the place we need to be in order to be filled with a never ending supply of love.

            

We’ve all had people in our lives who have given to us only to receive something. They expect us to give something back. That’s not a good feeling when someone only cares for you because of what you can do for them. Yet we do it all the time. We may have had good intentions in the beginning to give and give and give, but in the end we allow ourselves to think they owe us something back. Maybe they do owe us according to the law, but because of Christ, we are given an unlimited supply if we choose to use it.

            

My challenge today goes for me as well. It is to really intentionally come to a place where you can say that God is your everything and that he is your only source of energy and love, and then secondly to use that to truly love with no return.

You are dearly, dearly loved.

  

The idea and title “love with no return” came from a message from Josh Lorimer at a college group last year. My thoughts here had much to do with that message.