Articles
To Love or Not to Love, It's Our Choice
God is the perfect example of love and Christ being the Son of God is no different. Despite our trespasses God deems mankind to be worthy of the salvation only He can provide. Christ willingly sacrificed Himself, so that mankind could attain that salvation with the price of His holy blood. If you were asked to describe what love is, one of the first things to come to mind would most likely be that love is putting others before yourself, no matter the circumstances. Why? Because of Christ’s and God’s example, they both had a choice and they chose us.
We also have the greatest choice of our lives, and how we act on our choice will not just affect how we live and view life on this Earth, but it will affect us for all eternity. Will we follow Christ, love God, and love each other with all our hearts, or will we choose to deny Christ, disobey God, and live with a selfish world able to consume and corrupt us. The world is going to be calling our names just as the people of the world called for Barabbas instead of Jesus. The world will try to make us believe that it will free us if we turn our backs on Christ and join them. But, the only way to salvation is by Christ’s example. We must live life obeying God, learning from Jesus, and dedicating our lives to loving others.
When we live our lives both as Christians and in the service of loving others, we are change the way we think. No longer are we to prioritize how we act on love and the way we love based on our own expectations and standards. But first, we are to love based off the standards the Scriptures provide for us, and then we must love based off the other person’s expectations, not our own. Let us look at this from the perspective of a hospital room. The scriptures would tell us that we are to love in a manner that is serving others, not ourselves. Based on this, we must not ask ourselves in what ways the nurse could fulfill our needs but in what ways we can meet their needs.
I have talked to many nurses and it is too often that they have gone hours without eating, going to the restroom, or having a patient treat them as a human being. If we ask ourselves as the patient or relatives of, “how can we meet those needs of the nurse?” We will scripturally find the best way to show Christ’s love to the nurse. Maybe we bring food for the staff, ask the nurse about their life, offer them a snack, do tasks the nurse could do to ease their load, etc. The more we look to Christ we will see the best ways we can love others.
Inspired by: Matt. 7:12, Mark 12:28-31, Titus 2:3-4, Rom. 6:23, Heb. 10:26-39, Eph. 2:1-13
