July 22, 2018 WWJWMTD by Steve the son of John

Holding Back Your Love

Without Love, Part #2

Yesterday, I wrote about our love growing cold and how sin works in our lives to make our love become non-effective. Sin does have a power over how much we love and to whom we refuse to love.

To love someone or not to love someone is a choice. We make these choices everyday—even minute-by-minute in our relationships with others. There are many levels of love; I do not love everything the same nor should I. God warns me about loving the things in this world more than I love Him. I cannot love God if I love anything else more than Him, but the more I love God it seems the more I am able to love what God has created and placed in this world.

God also warns about not loving yourself, or more exactly, not having a good self-esteem whereby you can love others as you love yourself. We must love others and ourselves in order to be a balanced, wholesome, and productive individual.

However, often we get our feelings hurt or do not get what we want so we hold back or refuse to love those close to us. To God, this is a grave mistake. Whenever we are so weak that we ‘hold-back’ or refuse to love someone that we have a relationship with, then we are in danger of God’s judgment. Often we base our love towards someone on getting ‘what we want’ or ‘how that person treats us’. Our love is selfish if it only works when we get what we want or when circumstances are perfect.

“Be angry and sin not,” the Bible says (Ephesians 4:26). If you display angry, resentment, or a perfectionist attitude in your love requirements then something is deeply wrong with you. I have noticed that ‘controlling personalities’ do more harm to others by their back-and-forth actions between loving someone one moment and then hating them only minutes later. Anger destroys more loving relationships than any other attitude or behavior.

True love is sincere, kind, hopeful, forgiving, humble, positive, thankful, happy, and of strong character. A person who holds back their love to others only when things benefit them personally is unchristian and promotes the destruction of others. I love others because God loves me. To me it is just that simple—it’s a Jesus thing.

WWJWMTD

What would Jesus want me to do?

Dr. Steven J. Wentland www.wwjwmtd.com

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