“Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And you have placed your faith and hope in God because he raised Christ from the dead and gave him great glory.You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart.”
In a recent post, we were reminded that the most valuable weapons we have in the spiritual war are faith, hope, and love. All three of these words make an appearance in today’s passage. Let’s take a moment to talk about what these words mean so that we can better understand how to use them in our lives.
Faith is the evidence of things we cannot see. Have you ever been sure of something that you had no physical evidence for? You just know something is true on a gut level? That’s a kind of faith. Hope is a sense of spiritual optimism that encourages us to keep going when we’d rather throw in the towel. Love is not a feeling, but a deeply sincere act of sacrifice and exalting another person flowing out of God’s care and sacrifice for us. The Bible often uses phrases like we see here: “with all your heart.” Every part of our beings are consumed when we are filled with the Holy Spirit and operating in his ways. When we have a spiritual optimism rooted in truth we know deep within our hearts, it manifests in love.
Here’s your freedom for today: the Spirit frees you up to sincerely love. Not love because you have to. Not “love” in quotation marks when your heart isn’t really in it. Deep, sincere love that flows directly from the Spirit of God Himself. When all that you long for is Christ, and all that you believe with every fiber of your being is Christ, then you will be completely free to love. Pride has no place there. Obligation has no place there. Just simple freedom to be in a family and community you were made for. That is the place of genuine belonging.