Do not use people, love them instead.
I heard this last weekend and it stayed with me. How simple this seems, but we always manage to mess it up. I know I am guilty of loving people to glorify myself. I usually begin loving people because I see God's love for me. But, it is so easy to forget God's love and only think about how great I am for being able to love.
So today I am going to encourage you to love others purely. We cannot love others in order to get them to do what we desire. We cannot love others to be able to control them. We cannot love them so they will give us what we need. We cannot love them to feel better about ourselves. And we cannot love them to boost our popularity.
We must love them because Christ loved us and nothing less is expected from us. It should be a natural consequence from the love we have received which was undeserved.
Not only is this pure love, but it is actually easier to love this way. When we are not looking out for ourselves, we can love more often. I find that when my motives are wrong, I can find excuses not to love people when I don't feel like it. Well, I'm too tired so I don't need to love today. I don't think I'm in the right mood so I might as well not even try to sincerely love. We find excuses and backtrack in our confidence to approach others and just love on them. When we stop looking out for ourselves and realize we are loving because we love God, it makes it so much easier. We can stop worrying about what people think of us because we should only care what our Creator thinks.When I am tempted to find excuses, now I stop and think: It is not up to me. I am commanded to love. I'm supposed to serve others because it is my duty to show Christ's love in everything I do. I am here for Him and because of Him anyway. Who am I to tell the God who gave His life in love that I don't feel like loving today? What pride!
People are not around us to be used for our various selfish desires. God will give us what we need. We are His servants and His tools to be used for His purpose and desires, not our own.
So go out and love today!
