Love and Christianity

At Ohio Northern University I am the treasurer for an organization called Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Fellowship of Christian Athletes is often shortened and called FCA. Every week we get together for an hour and discuss the Bible and connect it to our lives. I recently live tweeted one of our discussions which was on the topic of love. Love is a very important topic in the Bible and is a crucial aspect of the Christian faith. During the discussion we covered three main areas of love. The first was discussing love for yourself. The main of the section of loving yourself was finding value in yourself, not being a narcissist. We looked at the idea that God created us in his image and since God is perfect than we are perfect. This doesn't mean we do everything perfect, but it means we are perfectly ourselves. I am the perfect version of the person I am, and you are the perfect version of who you are and no two people are alike. The Bible is not as concerned with loving yourself as it is with loving others and those around you.  The second portion of our discussion looked at love for others and how we can go about showing love for others. Having love for everyone is one of the most important things taught in the Bible. If you are looking for a section in the Bible that has a major focus on love I would recommend first checking out 1 Corinthians chapter 13. In 1 Corinthians 13:13 it states "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." According to the Bible we are called to act in love toward everyone, even your worst enemy. I think if everyone acted in love toward one another, many problems present in the world would disappear. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world but it is the job of the proclaimed Christian to do everything in love regardless of the world around us. Romans 12:9-21 was another section of the Bible we discussed, it gives an overview of how to love others.  The final section of the discussion looked at our love for God and his love for us. For this section we looked at 1 John 4:16-18 and Proverbs 20:28. With these versus we discussed how we can prioritize our love for God versus our love toward earthly things. We also discussed why love from God can drive out fear, and finally we looked at the differences of emotional love and God's biblical love. C.S. Lewis has a quote that does a good job of describing where our focus should be "Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither." A focus on heaven will allow us to have joy here on earth, but if our aim is only toward earthly material objects than we will not find joy. No matter what you believe there are going to be good and bad times in life, in fact there are many stories in the Bible of suffering, but with an aim toward heaven we can still have joy even when times are difficult.