Keep On Loving

Scripture Reading: Hebrews 6:9-15

Key Verse: Hebrews 6:11

Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true.

Our Scripture Reading for today reminds us how important love is in God’s mind. This passage also reminds us that God’s definition of love is different than this world’s definition.

God’s definition of love is encased in Hebrews 6:10: “For God is not unjust. He will not forget how hard you have worked for Him and how you have shown your love to Him by caring for other believers, as you still do”.

The author of Hebrews is complimenting these believers for the way they “cared for other believers” because it showed their love for God. In other words, love is defined by action; that is, compassionate deeds done to help and comfort others.

We must not insert our own thoughts about love being just a warm, fuzzy feeling. This is likely to lead to a sense that we are terrible failures in our efforts to love others. God knows we can’t “feel” love toward strangers or the unloving people we meet. But we can show love toward others by serving them.

This definition of love is the highest quality of love possible. Think about it. If you feel love toward someone, then serving them is not that difficult. But if we do something that serves someone even though we don’t know them or we don’t “feel” inclined to do so… that is God’s definition of love.

This high standard of love helps us understand why the author of Hebrews wrote: “Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others…”. Every time a believer takes action to help another person, despite how they feel about that person, they take on the look of Jesus Himself.

In Hebrews 6:12, we see the motivation for working hard to show the love of Jesus to everyone that we encounter: “Then you will not become spiritually dull and indifferent. Instead, you will follow the example of those who are going to inherit God’s promises because of their faith and endurance”.

Closing our eyes to the need of someone that we could have helped dulls our inner spirit and starts down the path to indifference. When we do it over and over, we replace our “Christ-likeness” with “worldly-likeness”.

Notice the believers that are going to inherit God’s promises. It is those that keep their faith and have endurance in their loving deeds toward others. Galatians 6:9 reminds us to “not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up”.

Join me in keeping your eyes open to the needs around us today and be ready to help those that we can.

Father, bring to my attention those you want me to help today! In Jesus’s Name I pray, amen.