Listening as Love

One way to show love to others is to truly listen. Hearing is different than listening. To hear means you only hear the sound of words, but it doesn't mean any thought has been taken to truly understand and process what has been said.

People can tell if you've been listening to them and feel loved or respected if they know you're listening. They can tell by your questions and responses and if you remember what was said later.

It's not always easy to listen. Our brains are powerful and have the ability to process thoughts faster than words are spoken, so we have to purposely try to not have our thoughts go to the next thing or how to respond before the person is stating their complete thought when we should focus on what the person is saying.

And this principle also applies to listening to God's word. Listening to God's Word is one way to show love to God. We should think about his Words enough to truly understand. The same principles apply.

Introverts

Christians should be accepting and respectful of traits of introverts. Christianity is one where love for others is very important, and loving others includes allowing others to pursue what they enjoy.

Often people in their excitement to get a group at church going expect everyone to come to large groups and enjoy it. An introvert might not. Being in a big group is usually not fun to introverts. It's often exhausting: It's too much information all at once—an introvert loves to think about each idea, and often feels exhausted after large group meetings and parties where hundreds of ideas are thrown out there.

Even worse is if a person looks down on someone, or if a person is hard on themself, for not constantly going to events and parties, when really it's very often a matter of indifference. There is more than one way to get to know people, and being in a large group doesn't have to be the only option.

A person might look down on an introvert assuming that introverts don't care about people. But that's not true. When introverts are not with people they still like to think deeply about people and life and things. Talking with close friends is something they love.

If a person doesn't go to your event, the reason most likely is not that they don't like you or people. They just might not prefer being in a large group setting at that time. You might love the topic of the event or love being around lots of people at once. And that is good and fine, but you can't expect others to have the same preferences as you. Introverts at times do want to venture into large groups—it's a great way to meet people who might become close friends, something introverts love—so it's worth inviting them. But expecting them always to come isn't good.

6 Posts on Loving Others

Post by
Michelle Dowell, Contributor

The topic of loving others includes some of the most important things in life: family, friends, and evangelism. Here are six posts describing what loving others looks like:

1. Love Is Active. Love compels us to act.

2. Love for Others. "Love for others includes caring about what they care about."

3. How To Help a Friend in Need. I write about the best way to show love to others when they are in a time of need.

4. Love as the Apologetic. "One of the few truly interesting apologetics Christians have is love. Love in the Christian sense is interesting because it is so counter cultural to the world."

5. True Love is Unconditional. "True love is unconditional. Often we find in the world and church love which has a condition."

6. Liberty in the Christian Life. "... Love also does not insist on its own way. We might prefer certain things in the the church be this way or that way, but we cannot insist on preference or infringe upon the liberty of others because certain things displease us."

Watch for more posts on this topic in the future.

Loving Others in Practical Things

One of the most essential elements of loving others is caring about what they care about. We cannot really love someone if we do not care about the things which are important to them.

Conversely it is also avoiding things which upset them. If we have a friend where something of little or no importance upsets them we cannot love them if we bring it up.

You see this is what it means to love others as we love ourselves. We care about the things we care about very deeply. Love to others entails caring about what those people care about.

We cannot always get deeply excited about what others enjoy. If a friend loves to fish and I do not then I may not be able to connect on that topic well. But it is the spirit of love to care about what others care about within reason.

At the very least we should not act as if the interests of others are inferior or pointless. You see there are many things which interest others that do not interest us simply because we are different.

Some people like this piece of music and some people do not. Some people prefer certain types of food and some do not. In the realm of preference love should at a minimum accept that certain interests of others that we see no point in are simply a difference in preference.

Often we see people make absolute statements about preference and actually think they are saying something absolutely true. This is against the spirit of love. It is also somewhat irrational to think our preferences toward non ethical issues in some way are absolute or more valid than others' preferences to the same non ethical things.

Good Biblical Hermeneutics

I always view that good biblical hermeneutics need to be very simple. Scripture has many complex things to say but most of the teachings of the bible are very simple.

Often it is easy to become to cleaver when we read the bible. It is easy to second guess God's wisdom.

Can that text really mean that? Was that simply a cultural context and not really the teaching of scripture? Many questions of this nature hide an element of unbelief.

We do not want to trust that God knows better than we do. It is often easy to not like the will of God. It seems our path seems more pleasant at times than God's path.

The reality is that God's plan is to make us happy in himself. The law serves to protect human happiness not attack it.

A sophisticated hermeneutical approach is often intended to explain why the bible says things which offend our culture. The reality is we do not need to make the bible suitable to our culture rather we need to make our culture learn to understand why the bible says what it does and why the bibles teaching is loving.