Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. – 1 John 4:7-12 ESV

Warrior;
What we need is love! It was sung decades ago by the Beatles, and it is an important trait in our walk as followers of Jesus Christ. All throughout scripture we are admonished to love, and told without love we are nothing but frauds, fakes, apostates, abominations. 1 John 4 goes into the importance of love as a MARKER for a child of the Kingdom of God. John was known as the apostle, JESUS LOVED. The Gospel of John is considered the Gospel of Love. John seemed to be all about LOVE, do you know why? Because Jesus was LOVE INCARNATE. To Jesus LOVE was practically everything. In John 13:35, Jesus makes this powerful statement: “All men will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” The book of Wisdom, in the 3rd chapter, the chapter giving instructions on how to live we are told: Never let loving devotion or faithfulness leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will find favor and high regard in the sight of God and man. (Proverbs 3:3-4) Love leads the list of FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23) Jesus even created a NEW COMMANDMENT centered around LOVE: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. (John 13:34) Then Jesus upped the ante and said that this was the GREATEST OF ALL COMMANDMENTS, and that LOVE wipes out sin! See Mark 12:28-30, Matthew 22:36-40, 1 Peter 4:8.

Leader, LOVE was always on the mind of Jesus, and He tells us it is in the TOP 3 of HIS VALUES LIST, and of the TOP 3, it is the MOST IMPORTANT. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13) Jesus is our example, He is our glory, He is our REASON FOR OUR SEASON- the entire purpose of our creation! If this thing called LOVE is SO IMPORTANT, what IS LOVE? The Apostle Paul knew how important this was to JESUS, and knew how confusing this nominalization, LOVE, is that He wrote a chapter describing it to the church in Corinth. It is one of the greatest dissertations on love in the known world. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7) In the original language of the New Testament, which was written in Greek, there are 4 words that we translate into Love: Phileo, Agape, Eros, Storge; brotherly, Godly, Sexual and Familia. An interesting side note is that ‘Eros”, sexual love, is not in the Bible. Could that be because EROS is a feeling, while God defines love as a VERB? Love is NOT a noun, it is a VERB! Jesus Himself said that; Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. (John 14:23) All throughout the Bible God ties LOVE to an ACTION. Even the most famous Bible verse, John 3:16 shows us that LOVE IS A VERB. For God so loved the world…that HE DID SOMETHING about it. For a husband so loves his wife, that He does something about it. For a veteran so loved his country, they did something about it. For an LEO so loved their community, that they did something about it. Jesus put an exclamation on this point in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends”.

Conduit, we are told in the last days one of the signs will be the lack of love; And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. (Matthew 24:12) It is a sign of the end times, this LACK OF LOVE. Let us close by looking at Paul’s explanation of LOVE in the LOVE CHAPTER, 1 Corinthians 13. Paul finds that Love is so profound that it cannot be described or explained in one simple word. Paul has to use 15 different verbs to explain what love is, and then needs to tell us what LOVE is not. Paul, knowing the importance of getting the “love” point, goes to great lengths to help us understand this quality, this concept, this doctrine called LOVE. In Paul’s list about love, he uses seven verbs teach us what love is, and eight verbs teach us what love is not. Patient, kind; envy, boasting; arrogant, rude, self-serving; irritable, resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The great thing about VERBS is that they can be learned! We can LEARN TO VERB. The best way to get to Carnegie Hall is also the BEST way to LEARN HOW TO LOVE, Practice, Practice, Practice! We can learn to love in a biblical way. We can learn to be patient, to be kind. We can learn not to be envious. We can learn not to be irritable or resentful. We can learn not to rejoice at wrongdoing. We can learn to rejoice with the truth. We can learn to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. In this time of plandemics, the god of government, and an apostate church in a dying world.… What the WORLD and the CHURCH need is LOVE, sweet love! We must show evidence that demands a verdict! If loving one another was a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Or would it be a circumstantial case, a ‘he said, she said’? The TIME IS NOW to start with the people you interact with daily, the people that cross your path! We are called to See a need-meet a need! We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? (1 John 3:16-17) The time is now to BE LIKE JESUS and LOVE! Get your VERB ON!