Thursday, August 4, 2011

His love is unconditional...Part 2

I wrote this post several days ago about unconditional love. Since then I've really been thinking a lot about unconditional love and what it actually means to love someone unconditionally.

We are commanded to love people unconditionally, 1 Peter 4:8 NIV says:
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
The Message says it this way:
Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything.
I love that version and I think we can all learn something from that in our relationships.  "Love like your life depends on it." That's a great way to think about love between two people in a committed relationship.  When you love like your life depends on it, you give your partner room to make mistakes without worry of negative reciprocation, because like the verse goes on to say, "Love covers a multitude of sins."

If we all lived by this verse there would be far fewer divorces in our country.  It wouldn't be so easy to use the dreaded "D" word during disagreements or after a fight, because our love for our partner is life giving and not life draining.

Remember it all comes down to choices.  We can choose to love or we can choose not to.  We can choose to argue or we can choose to give grace and bow out of a no win situation.  We can choose to give love or we can choose to withhold love.  We choose to honor or dishonor our spouse with our words and actions.  We can choose to love unconditionally or love with conditions, but we have to remember that we are loved unconditionally by the One that brought us together.  His love for us covers all of our sins and if He can love us that way we need to do the same to our spouse.

When we married we made a commitment between 3 people; your spouse, yourself and Him.  He knows all of our sins, yet He still chooses to forgive and forget.  We need to be more like Him and grant that same grace to our spouse, because we know all of their sins as well and love makes up for practically everything.

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