Love Skills

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1 Thessalonians 3:12–13 "May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones."

What It Is Speaking to Me

Have you ever had to go to school or training for a job? Trade schools train students for the work they are going to do. Some jobs include onsite training for the first few weeks before the real work begins. Teachers go to college and earn education degrees that, ironically, teach them relatively little about actual classroom skills, yet still qualify them for the job. Even in movie-making, actors do it. Keanu Reeves did gun and martial arts training for both The Matrix and the John Wick films. Often the longer you are in a job, the more training you receive. Apprentices become Journeymen, then Masters. People in finance and tech can take qualifying exams that open doors to better opportunities.

So what is a Christian's background work? What skills and training do we need? What skills need to keep being developed, even after we have started in our spiritual walk, to level up our work?

Love. It is the skill we keep developing, keep leveling up in, keep learning more about, and keep applying to every situation. That is not always easy, especially when someone has wronged us or hurt people we care about. How do we love them? That is where our training gets tested.

A hundred years of movies and centuries of books have exemplified love primarily in terms of emotion, and that is not entirely wrong. But the downside of thinking of love as only an emotion is that when we do not feel love toward a person, we think we can opt out of it (which is not the case), or at least it is a genuine struggle.

Love is more than an emotion. It is a choice. In a sense, it is a skill, which means it is something you can grow in. The way to grow in it is to disconnect it from your momentary feelings toward that particularly difficult person and connect it instead to our Heavenly Father. He is the source of love, and when we tap into that source, we develop our capacity to love. Connected to Him, we are in school. We are being trained by His love, both His love for us and His love for that other person.

What Is It Saying to You?

Do you see love as a pure emotion? Or as something that can be developed intentionally?

What Are We Going to Do About It?

Consider one way you can develop love intentionally today and put it into practice, whether in prayer or in action.