Wednesday

Devotional
Love is an Action

Do you really love someone? Let's see how you act toward that person.

Love is more than attraction and more than arousal. It's also more than sentimentality, like so many of today's songs suggest. By this standard, is love dead when the emotion is gone? No, not at all. Because love is an action; love is a behavior.

Over and over again, in the Bible, God commands us to love each other. And you can't command an emotion. If I told you "Be sad!" right now, you couldn't be sad on cue. Just like an actor, you can fake it, but you're not wired for your emotions to change on command.

If love were just an emotion, then God couldn't command it. But love is something you do. It can produce emotion, but love is an action.

The Bible says, "Let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions." (1 John 3:18 NLT) We can talk a good act: "I love people." But do we really love them? Our love is revealed in how we act toward them

Today's devo brought to light the fact that love is not merely just an emotion, but also an action that we can do.
Although God has given us the choice to choose who to love, loving in itself is more through actions than words.
So that being said, action/behavior is more demonstrative than words.

I personally find it a struggle to love everyone and to be completely accepting of them.
This reminds me of what my mom always says to me from time to time; when I don't listen to her and do wrong, I try to weasel out of trouble
by saying 'I love you', but my mom's reply would always be "don't show that love through just those words; prove it".
And I'm starting to see the truth of those words; actions speak louder and more clearly than words alone.

18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:18

I think I'm one of those people who only says I love you to people I dont love (school friends or when someone gives me food) and never or rarely says I love you to people I actually love (other than parents, but not even that often to them). I think I show my love through actions. That's for people I actually love though, not those I'm trying to love. I sometimes tell people that I've learned to accept and love a person I really can't stand but then I just ignore them or make extremely shallow uncaring small talk with them. Its not enough to say I love you, we actually need to show OT through our actions.

This devotion has a similar message to the previous one. Don't show fake love to others. Love is something we control ourselves, and no one else can. And it isn't just an emotion, it is a commitment. If we just say "I love you" to someone, that isn't enough to prove that you love them. You have to actually show love by numerous things, such as helping them out when they are in trouble. So we should prove others that we truly love them, then they will realize that we are showing them true love.

Once you've made a commitment, make action toward it.
I'm not sure about you guy but for me:
In any relationship, I take some time aside with that person and then make that decision.
But I'm pretty sure we are all guilty of not taking action after we choose to do something. It sometimes is hard to love and take action upon it, this can be because of hesitance and uncertainty. But a good relationship is based in trust and reliance.
Also, do not pick and choose who to love; God says to love everyone and so listen to him.

Don't just say, "I love you" if you will not prove it through your actions.

"Talk is cheap"
~Audrey~ ;D

This is a core belief that Christians believe, summed up well by something Sam taught us in one of the theology classes. Faith=salvation + works. When we truly love God and commit ourselves to Him and His will, then naturally we will want to serve Him through actions after fully accepting Him as Lord and Savior. I like how Joel Houston explained it in the oceans link Jeremy posted; God wants to have more of us, He wants to get to know us better and better because He is a jealous God. When we love God back and strengthen our relationship with Him, we give God more room and more control to work through us- the action/works part of the equation. So when we really love God and other people, actions just naturally start to happen.

This past week, Ive been getting less then 5 hours a sleep... im exhausted but the work load keeps on piling up...

Love is something not easy to gain. It takes more then a day or a week to build a relationship with one another. Building a relationship takes years and years and that is love. Being on praise team, i wish i can say i love all of you and care for all of you but i cannot because some of you guys are new, and some of you guys i dont know well. But dont worry about it because as the months progress, we will get closer.
BUT we should never limit our love to only praise team. We need to try and love everyone in the congreation and obviosuly this is a very difficult task to complete because getting to know person is already difficult already. So getting to know over 80+ people is very very very super difficult.
But it is possible and the way to start is to start by getting closer to one person at a time. If you dont know how to start a conversation with someone you dont know hers a simpler way you can do it
ask questions and get to know the perosn.

Hey, I'm _____ (are you new here?) if new / (I've seen you around before but never got the chance to talk to you hahaha) if not

Hows your week?
What do you like?
talk about interests songs/food/work/education/topics are limitles

and if you guys get some sort of bond ask them if they want to chat more during the week day via text or fb
and taa daaaaa you just got closer to somone!

But this is obviously easier said then done. I know personally that i dont want to talk to new people and this isnt because i hate them what not. But its because i feel like im satisfied right now and i dont want anything to change. This is a terrible mind set i have and i NEED to change it...

We should never be satisfied with what we have and we should always be willing to take the extra step and effort to go even further.

Love is an action, that you and I feel,
Not towards everybody, but to a few its real.
Uh huh, God gave us the choice,
Show Him that we love Him and others through our actions not our voice.
Don't get confused, love is not an emotion,
Where feet may fail we may get lost in the ocean.
But if all else fails remember one thing,
To love everyone equally and show them that we care.
MY DAILY RAP DEVO FOR Y'ALL CAUSE WE GOTTA MIX THINGS UP. - J Kizzle

P.S. I am on my phone so you guys wont be able to see the afros, therefore:
Afro guy afro guy afro guy afro guy afro guy afro guy afro guy

^LOOL john I got inspired to do something different as well

Like it was in yesterday's devo, love is an action that can be controlled. We need to learn to really love each other consistently.
Other than loving each other, we also need to love God, which I think is something that gets ignored a lot in our everyday lives.
Very often we tend to correlate love with the actions that can be done to other people, but can we really say that we love God?
Every time that I think about loving God, I wonder why do I spend so much more time on other things if I supposedly love God so much?

If we really think about it, how much time do we spend with God per day? How much time do we spend reading His Word and learning?
Subtract that time from our 24 hour day and see how much time is left.

An important thing to mention, however, is that love shouldn't necessarily be quantified.
Nevertheless, we always tend to spend more time with something/someone that we love.

As this devotional starts off with, do we really love someone (in this case God)?
Can it be clearly shown by how you act towards him/her? Not that your love for God will be broadcasted, but it will be noticeable.
Towards the end of the devotional, it mentions a verse from the book of John, saying that we should show love by actions, not words.
In this context, I agree with Audrey that, "talk is cheap" and that it should be backed up by something solid.
Often times I feel that our words and our actions contradict each other, and our trust in God is only temporary, but it should not be so.
Now is the time to take action and to love with everything that we are, by doing everything that love demands to God and to others.

Love is an action.

I feel like the reason behind pointing love out as an action is to emphasize the point that our emotions should not be an excuse not to love somebody. Generally speaking, this also applies to our thoughts and opinions: our ideals. Our ideals shouldn't interfere with a command given to us by God, because our fundamental law that we should follow is to adopt his ideals and apply them to our lives. All that being said, God gives us free will which ends up dividing us from each other in the sense that we're not all uniform. Rather than only have a linear path of development, there are paths that branch out and people take different branches. That being said, God gives us a right path to take and we're fully capable of taking that path, regardless of our feelings about it: just as though we are able to eat food we dislike.

Point is, Love is an action, and therefore: our opinions are not excuses that exempt us from following God's command to love.