The Father himself loves you. He loves you because you loved me and believed that I came from God. (John 16:27)

What passions has God instilled in you?

What bewilders you about God’s love?

How have you experienced God’s love?

We can love only because God loves us. Our love flows from his love even when we don’t acknowledge the source. Without God, there is no love, and his love isn’t a dormant love. He loved so much that he gave his Son, Jesus, to come to earth and die an excruciating death so that he could live again on earth briefly before returning to heaven and providing a way for us to have eternal life with him. God’s love spurred action – an amazingly extensive sacrificial action. No matter what we do out of God’s love, we will never be as sacrificial with it as God was. Thankfully, God doesn’t ask us to be. He simply wants us to respond in obedience as he pours love into us. He wants us to pour it onto others. In order to do so, we must know what God loves.

In order to know what God loves, we must stay in his Word. We must be familiar with him. We must be able to discern what he wants us to know about a situation and, more important, how he wants us to respond in obedience. Sometimes love is with words and sometimes it’s with actions. Sometimes God wants us to be silent and step aside, because speaking up or stepping out in the specific timing might not be the expression of love someone needs. The important thing is for us not to justify our own responses. We don’t decide what people need; God does. He knows the details; we don’t. He is capable of the most growth-producing response. We’ll often strive for the comfortable response instead. Loving what God loves isn’t easy – no matter how passionate we are about God. Loving what God loves is sacrificial, but it doesn’t come close to God’s sacrifice for us.

Express God’s love to someone in the next 30 minutes. Listen. God will let you know how.