2025-02 Love One Another

February is the month that Valentine’s Day is celebrated for those who participate. It is also known as Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine and is celebrated every year on February 14th. The tradition originated as a Western Christian feast day honoring one or two early saints named Valentinus. The focus of the celebration is LOVE – a special day set aside to give gifts like cards, flowers and candy to a significant other and to enjoy special dinners with them. Even school children give cute cards to their classmates celebrating friendship. Not everyone chooses to celebrate, however, what we should celebrate as Christians is an everyday, all-day love.

The Bible teaches us to express and celebrate love every day not just a special day. It emphasizes the importance of consistent, unconditional love through our behavior and words towards one another throughout our lives. Love is the core value of our spiritual walk.

1 John 4:7-11 tells us, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we 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.

Genuine love is not necessarily over the top gestures on one day but is shown continually through acts of kindness, support, and compassion. As well, Christian love is not limited to romantic relationships, but it extends to friends, people we work with, family, and even people we do not know.

God IS love and He is the origin of love. It is an essential aspect of His nature and is key to our Christian faith. His love is that we see in and through His actions. His love is unconditional, sacrificial, and everlasting and is available to the entire human race.

Christians can take advantage of every day to share the love of Christ with others and allow His light and love shine through them. So, what is true love? One of the most beautiful descriptions of love, true, unconditional love is found in 1 Corinthians 13.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. (2) If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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