The Love Walk
"And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love." 2 John 1:6
"And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and has given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling smell." Ephesians 5:2
"It (Love) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." 1 Corinthians 13:7 (NRSV)
In the last scripture, Paul tells the Corinthians what extent love goes. It bears all things, meaning when your brother or child cannot go any longer, you carry them along with your burdens. You bear their pains, their struggles, their difficulties. You are patient (GWT) and never give up (NIV) on the fact that God can change them even when they seem to have fallen off the path. Love believes all things--not meaning that it believes everything, but here in another translation, it always has faith (NLT). Love has faith and believes in spite of all things that it will get better even when worldly facts say otherwise. Love trusts (NIV) that God will hold true to His word and respects the promises His words holds within. The only similarity I have noticed through all of the translations is that love hopes through all things. In the love walk, you cannot give up hope. It will get difficult to continue to love someone who hates you in spite of how they treat you. It will be seemingly impossible to love the person that sins against you. In marriages one of the hardest things to do is to hope for the best when one person has stepped outside of the marriage or has caused their spouse to lose trust in them. But we must remember that we are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)--so holding onto the transgressions of a person and living outside of love will cause you to disobey God. For that purpose, we must have the love God gives, the love that can endure all things. In spite of every obstacle thrown at you to lose heart, you must have that long-lasting, enduring love, the love that caused God to sacrifice the Son for our redemption. Walking in love is not easy because we were no longer conditioned to love unconditionally, yet instead everything that goes against the essence of God is the predisposition of our flesh. Walking in love means forgiving every wrong (don't be foolish though--use the wisdom God freely gives in all situations and the spirit of discernment--James 1:5), standing in the faith that God will bring His words to pass, hoping when it seems there is no need for hope, and enduring until the end--whatever that may be. Yes this is a difficult road, but with the bounty being so great for us to reap in the afterlife, why risk living any other way? Psalm 119:1-2 says this: "Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart." Blessed in some translations reads 'happy', or 'joyful'. According to the first scripture and throughout the Bible, the first and greatest commandment is that we love God and love others, or walk in love. So to ensure your own happiness, you must simply love God and others from every part of yourself, because love has the power to change all things.
"You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." Deuteronomy 6:5
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