Morning Encouragement

What Is Love? | Day 17 "We love because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19, NIV Good morning, friends. Every letter worth keeping ends with a line that gathers up everything the writer has been building toward the whole way through, one sentence meant to be read last precisely because it changes how every earlier sentence is read. This series has been writing toward a line exactly like that, and this morning we finally get to read it whole.

What Is Love? | Day 16 "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." Ephesians 5:25, NIV Good morning, friends. Every love this series has traced so far has had its own day to be examined slowly, one word at a time, one facet held up to the light before setting it down and picking up the next. This morning, all of those loves walk into the same house at once and are asked to live there together. The Love That Gave Itself First This series has already traced five distinct loves, agape, storge, phileo, ahavah, and chesed, and marriage is the one relationship built to hold all five within a single covenant. Paul goes looking for the deepest of the five first, because everything else in a marriage is meant to be built on it. "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." (Ephesians 5:25, NIV). Notice the measure Paul reaches for: not affection, not attraction, not loyalty alone, but C...

What Is Love? | Day 15 "Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death." 2 Corinthians 7:10, NIV Good morning, friends. Yesterday we left a father standing at the edge of his own field, watching a road for a son who was still a long way off. This morning that son comes home, and we get to ask the question this series has been building toward: what actually happens once the door opens.

What Is Love? | Day 14B "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." Romans 12:18, NIV Good morning, friends. Yesterday we sat with the ache of loving someone honestly and watching that love get refused. This morning we look at the harder half of the same question, both why that refusal happens and what we are actually meant to do once it does.

What Is Love? | Day 14A "He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem." Isaiah 53:3, NIV Good morning, friends. There is a particular kind of silence that follows an invitation nobody accepted, the unanswered text that sits there past midnight, the empty chair at a table set for someone who never came, the call that rings once and drops straight to voicemail again. Most of us know that silence somewhere in our chest even before we can name why it stings so much.

What Is Love? | Day 13 "Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good." Romans 12:9, NIV Good morning! Some kinds of love get nervous around hard questions and would rather change the subject than sit still and look at something uncomfortable. This morning we get to talk about a different kind of love, one steady enough to face a hard question without flinching and without losing its warmth in the process.

What Is Love? | Day 12 "Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ." Ephesians 4:15, NIV Good morning, friends! Some of the hardest words we will ever speak to another person are the ones that come from loving them the most, and this morning we get to sit with why that is, and why it is worth the risk anyway. We have already seen in this series that silence is not the same thing as kindness, and that a love which never speaks a hard word is not really love at all. What we have not yet slowed down to consider is where that kind of love actually comes from. The love behind truthful speech in Scripture is agape, the same self giving love we have traced back to God himself throughout this series. Agape is not a feeling we generate on our own or a virtue we simply decide to practice harder. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is worth repeating. We have returned to this truth several ...

What Is Love? | Day 11 "For if, while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!" Romans 5:10, NIV Good morning. There is a particular kind of person we all keep on a mental list, someone whose name makes us tense up before we even remember why, and this morning we bring that list into the light. Anyone Can Love a Friend

What Is Love? | Day 10C "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst." 1 Timothy 1:15, NIV Good morning. Over the last two mornings we sat with a lawyer's question to Jesus, "Who is my neighbor," and watched a Samaritan cross paths with a stranger nobody else would touch. This morning we want to close that conversation.

 What Is Love? | Day 10B "Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." Romans 13:10, NIV Good morning. Yesterday we left a question hanging in the air, the kind that is easy to answer in theory and much harder to live out, and this morning we pick it back up.

What Is Love? | Day 10A He answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself." Luke 10:27, NIV Good morning. Some of the best questions we ask are really attempts to get out of something, and this morning's story starts with exactly that kind of question.

What Is Love? | Day 9 "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 1 John 4:18 (NIV) Good morning. There is a particular kind of dread that comes with an envelope from a government office we do not recognize, the kind that makes us set it aside for an hour before we open it, bracing for whatever verdict is inside. Most of us know that feeling somewhere in our bodies before we know it in our minds. This morning we are going to talk about a summons that will never come, and why that changes everything about how we are meant to live.

  What Is Love? | Day 8   “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” John 8:11 (NIV)   Good morning, friends. A skilled forger can copy nearly everything about an original. The color is right. The texture is right. Even the signature looks convincing at a glance. What a forger can never copy is the one thing that makes the original valuable, the truth of where it came from and what it cost to produce. Held up to the light, the forgery gives itself away.

What Is Love? | Day 7   "Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:22-23 (NIV)   Good morning, friends. Think of a promise made so long ago that the person who made it would have had every reason by now to let it quietly expire. No one would blame them. The other party broke their end of it years back. And yet the promise still holds, not because it has to, but because the one who made it decided a long time ago that keeping it was never really about what the other person deserved.  

What Is Love? | Day 6   "That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." Genesis 2:24-25 (NIV)   Good morning. Today this series turns to a love the Bible describes in remarkable detail without ever giving it a specific name of its own.  

  What Is Love? | Day 5   "One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." Proverbs 18:24 (NIV)   Good morning, friends. There is a kind of love that shows up not because it has to, but because it wants to. No blood ties it to us. No command was ever issued to produce it. And yet it is one of the sweetest gifts woven into human life, the friend who stays when staying is a choice rather than an obligation.  

  What Is Love? | Day 4   "Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves." Romans 12:10 (NIV)   Good morning, friends. There is a kind of love none of us ever had to learn. It was there before we could speak, before we could reason, before we understood anything at all about what love even meant.  

  What Is Love? | Day 3, Part B   "I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." Luke 18:14 (NIV)   Good morning. Yesterday we looked at the first way the phrase "as yourself" gets misread, the cultural argument that self-generated love is the prerequisite for loving the neighbor. Today we stay in the same five words and look at a second error, one that lives closer to home for many who have walked with God for a long time. It is the error of the person who knows God's love well enough to have quietly begun measuring their devotion against the person beside them.  

What Is Love? | Day 3, Part A   "And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’" Matthew 22:39 (NIV)   Good morning. Some of the most important questions in Scripture hide inside its shortest phrases. Five words sit at the close of yesterday’s commandment, and they have been pulling people in different directions ever since: love your neighbor as yourself. Who is this neighbor? And what does loving them as ourselves actually require of us? This series cannot move forward without stopping here first.  

  What Is Love? | Day 2   “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Matthew 22:37-39 (NIV)   There are mornings when a single question cuts straight through everything else competing for attention. Yesterday, we stood at the source of love and saw what agape means and where it comes from. Today we hear what Jesus does with it.