Love Is For Losers?

Many people are so self centered they forget (or decide not) to show kindness, love, and respect to others they come in contact with during their day. Though it’s not always easy and even though I don’t always act the way I should, I try to be kind and considerate to everyone I come in contact with. It’s sometimes more difficult than others to practice what I “preach”, but I try.

It’s easy to show love to those who love us back. It takes more effort to show love to those who; treat us badly, talk about us, are disrespectful to us, say bad things about us, create stories about us, or seem to enjoy driving us crazy. It’s at those times when we have to rely on something else to give us the strength to show love to those people.

Some churches today even are this way in their love for its members or their community. Pastors have been known to teach their congregations that it’s good to show love to one another until someone steps out of line, then all bets are off and they sick the dogs on them. I did some quick checking and that’s not what I was able to locate in the Bible. God tells us to show love to one another even if they’ve wronged us. If it’s of a grievous nature, we are even instructed on how to confront that person (with love) and if they are not responsive to us then we are to remove them from our communion until they ask for forgiveness or are otherwise restored into a walk with us. We’re not to hate them, but we are to avoid a relationship with them. We should never use their failures as an opportunity to kick them to the curb or turn bitter toward them. That is the way the world acts and we, as Christians, are in the world, not of the world. We’re supposed to love, even those who have wronged us. Our love is not conditional or based on certain criteria to be met before we love. Any church or pastor that preaches that bitterness/hatred is the way to go is wrong and it would benefit you greatly to locate another place to serve God. One that lives by the motto “love the sinner, hate the sin”.

I’m now climbing off my soapbox. :-)
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1 Corinthians 13 (The Message)
The Way of Love

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.

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.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
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You can learn a lot about a person by what his or her T-shirt says. Not too long ago while out shopping, a young woman I saw was wearing a bright red T-shirt that said, “Love Is for Losers.” She could have been joking or maybe she thought it was clever. Perhaps however she had been hurt by a relationship and had pulled away from others rather than risk being hurt again. I truly can understand that. Whatever the reason for the shirt, it got me thinking.

Is love really for losers? The fact is, when we love, we take risks. From personal experience I know that we can get hurt by people, disappointed by people, or people could even leave us. Love can lead to loss.

But the Bible challenges us to take the “high road” in loving others. In I Corinthians 13, Paul tells us what it means to live out God’s kind of love. The person who exercises Godly love doesn’t do so for personal benefit or gain but rather “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (13:7). Why? Because Godly love endures through life’s hurts by pulling us toward the never-diminishing care of the Father.

So, maybe love is for losers—because it is in times of loss and disappointment that we need God the most. Even in our struggles, we know that “love never fails.”