Learning to Love...Continued from page 1
Susan Nikaido
Quite a difference, isn’t there?
The word love as it is used today in literature and movies and on television is being sadly debased. Its connections are mostly with the romantic and the erotic. But in the Bible we see love as the sacrificial, self-imparting quality of God’s nature. Did God so love the world that He felt a warm glow in His heart? No, God so loved the world that He plucked out His heart and gave His only Son. That’s the kind of love spoken of in 1 Corinthians 13.
2. Choose and read one of the following chapters from the Gospels: Matthew 9, Mark 10, Luke 7, or John 14. In the space below, write down all that you observe from this chapter about the way Jesus loved people.
3. What is it about Jesus’ love that stands out to you the most?
4. a. Read 1 John 4:7-12,16-17,19-21, printed below. Underline all the statements that indicate why it is important that we love one another.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. . . .
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. . . .
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
b. From this passage in 1 John, summarize why it is so important to God that we love the people around us.
The Supremacy of Love
In the first three verses of 1 Corinthians 13, Paul showed the supremacy of love over other things. Love has supremacy over spiritual gifts. Paul said he could have ecstatic utterances and wonderful rhetoric, but if he had not love he was like the noisy gong they could hear sounding in the heathen temples. A spiritual gift is of value only as it is prompted by and exercised in love.