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We encourage you to jot down what you hear God speaking to you about today as you listen to the teaching. Plan on diving deeper into the message by downloading the study guide on Sunday night so you can compare your notes with the guide as a path for deeper spiritual commitment. Once posted, the teaching video and study guide can be found under the Media tab.
Love is … WEEK THREE
Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless. —1 Corinthians 13:8-10 (NLT)
Spiritual Gifts (which every Christian has) are part of how you worship, not what you worship.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. —1 Corinthians 13:11 (NLT)
You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. —Hebrews 5:12-13 (NLT)
Am I more loving today than I was yesterday?
Three marks of mature, growing love and the commitments we can make today to pursue it:
1. In a world where love is considered a theory and a feeling, I will choose to make it a practice.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. —John 13:35 (NIV)
How happy I was to meet some of your children and find them living according to the truth, just as the Father commanded. —2 John 1:4 (NLT)
Maturing, growing love is choosing to ACT in love when you don’t FEEL like loving.
2. In a world full of people fighting for the top, I will choose to fight for the bottom.
For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. —Ephesians 5:22-24 (NLT)
For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her. —Ephesians 5:25 (NLT)
Mutual submission and mutual service are two of the keys to thriving relationships.
3. In a world where love is typically transactional, I will choose to extend love that is unconditional.
But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. —Romans 5:8 (NLT)
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. —1 John 4:11 (NLT)
We love each other because he loved us first. —1 John 4:19 (NLT)
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