The Process of Love (Part 5): How Do I Love When It Gets Difficult?

TO START

This week, we jumped into part 5 of a series called The Process of Love, a series that invites us to come to terms with how to love those who are hard to love in our lives. Over this series, we will unpack 1st John in hopes of unpacking how we might receive and extend love to those who aren't always easy to love especially when it gets really challenging. 

  • What is your instinctual reaction when love gets hard (with work, with friends, with kids, in marriage)? Do you withdraw, bear down, talk it out, etc.?

TO DISCUSS

Read 1 John 4:8-16

  • How often do you think of the reality that God isn’t just loving but is love itself? What does God being love mean in your life? 

In the sermon, Zane mentioned that one part of Jesus’s life in which we struggle to understand God’s love; Jesus’s gruesome death on the cross. 

  • Do you ever find yourself struggling with the correlation between God being good and loving and the way that Jesus dying on the cross? Why or why not?

Zane points us to the reality that our responses to God’s love are often different based on the season we find ourselves in: superiority (don’t need a lot of it), doubt (compare God’s love to those who haven’t loved us wll) or complacency (doesn’t feel relevant).   

  • So, of the three responses above, what is your typical response to God’s love? Or maybe what’s your response to God’s love right now?

Sometimes, in life, we come across moments where we have an opportunity to let the love of God enable us to love and we simply miss it. 

  • Has there been a moment this past week where you hesitated to love someone right in front of you? How might you not miss those moments as often in the future?

TO CLOSE

This week, we want to invite you to pray for the ability to remember that God’s love is meant to sustain us and protect us. As much as we tend to think this or desire this, we are not able to love people faithfully unless we open ourselves to the love of God. The process of love includes lifting up the good and hard things on the hearts of those around us. So we want to invite you to take prayer requests and lift those up together! 

God, you are love and your love sustains us. 

Fill us with your Spirit and help us to love as you love.

We are weak, Lord, but when we are weak, you are strong within us.

Thank you that it’s not all up to us. 

Thank you that you equip us to face each day with the power of your love. 

We want to love you, Lord, and we need you to remind us of your love today and every day.

Amen.  

Matt DeLano