How do you express your love for your brother, your sister? What does it mean to love?

Can we love anyone, or anything, apart from the grace and mercy of the Holy Spirit?

Love is listening, love is holding the moment as a moment of God’s, not ours. Love is dwelling in the face of despair with confidence that God is Almighty, everlasting, and Christ is our redeemer. Love is asking God to fill our moments and overflow our cups so He can pour out over his people. Love is physical, thoughtful, and direct. Love sees with Christ’s eyes and hears with Christ’s heart, and thinks with His mind. Love sleeps in protected dreams. This is how love transforms, as the anti-black hole, drawing each of us in more inexorably than we thought possible and revealing us as His new creation. Love is about Him, his magnificence, his holiness, his peace.  Love is life, generating community, creating the greatest truth moment to moment, love is the memory of Christ, the Holy Spirit’s opening our eyes to the Ebenezer’s of each day.

Love is the verb that acts out our trust, that directs our faith. Love is a bath of redeeming light, revealing our inadequacies and cleansing us with the purity of our Lord’s Spirit.

The following are scriptures that uncover what God intends for love to do through us and in us. 

What love does

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.  

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13 

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Romans 13 

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. 2 Corinthians 5 

The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters. For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 1 John 3 

because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus. I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother. Philemon 1:5 

 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. Ephesians 4 

want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself, Colossians 2 

 May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ. 2 Thessalonians 3

 and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 1 Timothy 1

Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. 1 Timothy 4