Love Is Not Nice

Love is not nice.

Love is real. Love is intense. Love is a deep truth not of this world, so deep that the world itself sees only its surface.

Love is what keeps mothers and fathers up nights, praying for their childrens' futures. Love is what makes pastors spend a week crafting a thirty minute message. Love is what drives the station managers to hold donation drives when the budget of the local Christian station falls short.

Love is what makes me ask you how you are, and what matters in your life. Love is what makes me wonder what deep pain from your past is keeping you from opening your heart. Love is what makes me hold my tongue when you say something inane or insulting or blasphemous. Love is what keeps me patient or polite while inside my heart is breaking to see you hurting others because of your hurt. Love is what makes me happy when you are happy, and sad when you are sad.

Love is what keeps God from consuming with fire or water this dark world of people who hurt people. Love is what makes Him seek you, sending annoying people and innocent people and fanatical people who all want you to join them in knowing Him.

Hate put Jesus on the cross, but love kept Him there.

This is love's promise: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."

This is love's call: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me."

This is love's truth: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."

Love is not just nice. Love cares about you and wants the best for you. God is love; say yes to His love, and a whole new world is opened to you.

(All scripture references from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version(TM) Copyright(C) 2000; 2001 by Crossway Bibles, A Division of Good News Publishers, All Rights Reserved.)