Light the Candle: Love

Kylie Voight

Love.

This last week of advent is all about love. I would argue love is the most important thing in the entire world. God created us to be in a LOVING relationship with Him. It is LOVE that prompted Jesus to wrap himself in flesh and be born in a manger. It is His great LOVE for you and me that Jesus was able to endure the sufferings of His crucifixion. It's all about love!

Jesus gives us the two greatest commandments in Matthew 22. He commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. He commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus also says in John 13:35 that others will know we follow Him by the way we love. Love is a part of every single thing we do. If we do something without love, we've really done nothing at all.

We as humans can't find this love within ourselves. It's a supernatural unconditional love that can only be found in God. John tells us in 1 John 4:8, ”Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.“ God is the only place we can find this love.

I encourage you to lean into the only source of true love these next few days as you're gathering with family and friends. Allow Him to take over your heart and fill it with love to pour out to those around you. And finally, remember that it is God's love for you that brought Him down to earth and eventually to the cross, so that you and I would be able to have a relationship with Him.

”For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.“

John 3:16-19