When You’ve Given All the Love You Can Give

CURRENT TEACHING SERIES 40 Days of Love

When You’ve Given All the Love You Can Give By Rick Warren — Jul 28, 2015 “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” (1 Corinthians 13:7 NLT, second edition) Love can be absolutely exhausting. Don’t let anyone fool you. The kind of love that really makes a difference in this world will zap everything out of you. Sometimes you just don’t feel like you have any more love to give. Maybe you’re in a people-intensive job, such as teacher, salesman, or server, and you come home and think, “I just can’t face another need, another problem, or another heartache.” So you just shut down. Or you need to show love to a particular person who is demanding, selfish, and never returns your love. And you just think to yourself, “I’m done. No more.” While that’s perfectly natural and human, it’s not the standard of love God calls us to in the Bible. The Bible says, “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (1 Corinthians 13:7 NLT, second edition). Love never gives up. How can you have that kind of persistent love for another person? You get refueled. When my kids were young, I remember taking the family to a nearby air show. It was so impressive to see how they would hook up a tanker to a jet in flight to refuel. I’ll never forget that. But can you imagine someone flying a jet and saying, “I don’t need to refuel!” The jet would crash and burn. In a long distance flight, a jet has to refuel. To give the kind of persistent love that God wants you to give, you have to refuel your love tank. Look around at society, and you’ll see it’s littered with debris from relationships that have crashed and burned because people didn’t refuel their love. How do you refuel your love tank? You start by letting God love you. The Bible says, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19 NIV). When you’re worn out, tired, and can’t imagine showing love to anyone else, remember that God loved you so much that he sent his Son to die for you. Now that’s real fuel. That’s what keeps you going when you want to quit. PLAY today’s audio teaching from Pastor Rick>> Talk It Over How does your daily quiet time help you refuel your love tank? What are some ways you can recharge and refuel throughout your day to help you gain perspective and help you remember God’s love so that you can love others better?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga6Qtxzd6vk What does it mean to have love that is “always hopeful”? Today’s Scripture “...the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God...” (Galatians 2:20, ESV) SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS The God Kind of Faith Faith is all around us. People have faith in so many different things: faith that a friend will be true, faith that your job is taking you on a certain career path, faith that the chair you are sitting on is going to hold you up! Faith is simply believing in something. But there are different kinds, or levels, of faith. We’ve all been given a measure of faith. The question is, what are you doing with it? The God kind of faith will cause you to believe for things when you don’t even know how they’ll happen. It will take you further than you ever dreamed. It probably won’t make sense in your mind, but you have to allow your spirit to rise higher than your thinking. Don’t ever talk yourself out of believing. Don’t focus on all the reasons why not; instead, allow supernatural faith to rise up within you. Meditate on His Word that says you can do all things through Christ, and you are strong in the Lord and the power of His might. As you rise up in faith, He’ll take you places you’ve never dreamed, and you will live the abundant life He has for you! A Prayer for Today “Father, today I humbly open my heart to You. Use me for Your glory and have Your way in my life. I choose to trust You. I choose faith in Jesus’ name. Amen.”