“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8 KJV)
If God is love, then it sounds like knowing what love is is pretty important. There is an interesting pattern with love. Do you know what the fastest way is to drain your love for another person? Judge them! It doesn’t even have to be something big. It can be as trivial as you like. They do this or that wrong. They fail to do this or that. When they do do it, they do it badly. You get the idea. Guess what the biggest antidote is for judgements? Forgiveness! It’s a double antidote. First, because it lets go of what you were judging them for. It also right sizes whether you even had a real standing for judging them to begin with. It both heals the ability to love them again and humbles us back to a position that we probably should never have left.
Following God, the very essence of love, helps us to be slow to judge and in a humble posture. So judging isn’t merely dangerous because of the fingers pointing back at you, but because it drains you of the one thing that identifies you as a follower of Christ; the ability to love your brother. Notice that this love is very different than tolerance. The drunk is actually more of a person sober. The addict is more of a person clean. The person in sin actually thinks that tolerating them and their sin makes a person bigger. The reality is that the sin is devouring them. It makes them smaller, less of a person, the longer they dwell in it.
So, love makes room for you by dealing with the sin. Love teaches us to love the other by making room for the other by lifting them up before God. When we lift another up before God, it allows God to adequately deal with what is wrong and helps us keep a humble posture. Once the thing that was devouring us is handled, our growth is unlimited. We can do and learn things that we could never imagine while we were still being devoured. People notice when they see real love because the only way that love was possible is because you’ve been around God someway somehow. Love was never patient because it was momentarily pretending that the issue never existed, it was patient because it was giving time and space necessary for you to surrender to God. Once healed, you are more of yourself; not less. Love makes room for people. It allows them to really grow. It allows them to really thrive. It allows relationships that contain trust again. It allows a self control not so much because you’re stronger, though you may now be, but because you can recognize poison before you ingest it. Genuine goodness and kindness is only found in love. Perfect love actually repositions fear. It teaches you a healthy respect for the source of love and why it must always be first at the same time that it casts out the fear of those things which would otherwise devour you. Love makes you whole.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2 KJV)