Loving people because we Love them, not because we ought to Love them

So, we finished Homegroup (a group of people meeting in a home to explore faith) last night by asking God to speak to us. As we were quiet, Christine began to talk about God’s love and how we need to share it freely and what came to me was:

God’s ideal is that we love other people because we are full of his love, not because we ought to love them.

I don’t think God loves us because he thinks that he ought to, God loves us because ‘God is love’.

During the evening we had been looking at Acts 10 and we had reminded ourselves that God wants to speak to us and that sometimes this will involve us receiving something new or unexpected from him.

We also noticed that lots of people came to follow Jesus because Peter prayed and eventually listened to God, not because he tried harder.

In a nutshell, what I felt that God was saying to me/us was that we need to be so full of his love that it overflows to the people around us.

How do you go about loving others? Do you just try hard and feel guilty when you find it hard to love people or do you pray for God’s love to fill you so that you his love can overflow out of you?

If God is love and he lives inside us, then the more we let him fill us with his presence then the more loving we will be.

‘May the Lord make your love for one another and for all people grow and overflow, just as our love for you overflows. May he, as a result, make your hearts strong, blameless, and holy as you stand before God our Father when our Lord Jesus comes again with all his holy people. Amen.’ (1 Thessalonians 3.12-13)