By Audrey Bauman

Valentine's Day - red and pink hearts, chocolates, gifts! All those things we associate with love.

But if you asked God about love, he'd give you quite another focus.

1 Corinthians 13: 4 - 7  NLT 

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Love is patient, and we’re not perfect, so patience is something we all need to work on in our relationships/marriage.  All couples are made up of two very different people. In fact, there is a saying that “opposites attract”.  But those opposites together make a great team if they are patient with each other.  The funny thing is over the many years Wayne and I were together, we moved more to the centre on that perfectionist issue.  He became a lot more relaxed, and I tried to do things well.  

I want you to think about this patience issue with your partner/your family.  What is the thing that irritates you most?  Do you need to look more carefully at your own expectations?  Do you have to decide that “whatever it is” is just who they are, and it’s something you need to be patient about and accept?  Maybe you need to figure out a compromise which means YOU have to do some changing. Take a deep breath and remind yourself of how patient God is with you. Think about it.

"Love is not jealous." When our children were very young, I was jealous of my husband, and that didn’t create a very good atmosphere in our marriage. There was a lot of petty criticism on my part, and I became an expert at “suffering without saying anything” – how annoying is that!  At the time I didn’t realize I was jealous.  I thought the problem was that he was too busy and needed to spend more time with me and our young family.  It was all his fault, of course. Now that I look back, I realize that I was angry because I resented the fact that he got to go out to work every day, and his routines hadn’t changed.  He got to have fun with the challenges of his job, and set his own schedule.  I was at home, and discovering that parenting little ones creates chaos and fatigue.  Putting it bluntly, I was jealous. The Bible tells us that jealousy or envy is a destructive quality.  Proverbs 14: 30 says, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones”. (NIV)  A longer passage of scripture in James goes into more detail about the results of jealousy.

James 3: 13 – 18  NLT

“If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. ¹⁴ But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t cover up the truth with boasting and lying. ¹⁵ For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. ¹⁶ For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.

¹⁷ But the wisdom from above is first of all pure. It is also peace loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others. It is full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds. It shows no favoritism and is always sincere. ¹⁸ And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of righteousness.”

So if you’re finding yourself grumbling to yourself about how easy life is for your partner or your friends, and how you seem to get the harder end of things, realize that love is not jealous, and that jealousy only leads to a worse situation.

 “Love keeps no record of being wronged”.  Even Solomon had that figured out.  “Love prospers when a fault is forgiven, but dwelling on it separates close friends.”   (Proverbs 17:9  NLT)  You know that for sure as well, don’t you?  You NEVER remind someone of something they did that you didn’t like.  Or have you?

There are some sides to forgiveness for wrongs done that are really serious.  When a partner or friend does something to smash trust, it’s hard to forgive.  It takes a long time to trust again – if ever.   If that is the situation in your life, then I’d strongly recommend seeing a counsellor.

Just like all the other qualities of love in these verses, this ability to forgive and forget comes from our Heavenly Father.   If He wasn’t forgiving, we’d all be doomed.  His patience is so special. He forgives and forgets as we make the same mistakes over and over again.  There is a psalm that I love, but right now I want to focus on verses 8 to 14.

 Psalm 103:8-14 (NLT)

⁸ The Lord is compassionate and merciful,
    slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love.
⁹ He will not constantly accuse us,
    nor remain angry forever.
¹⁰ He does not punish us for all our sins;
    he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve.
¹¹ For his unfailing love toward those who fear him
    is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.
¹² He has removed our sins as far from us
    as the east is from the west.
¹³ The Lord is like a father to his children,
    tender and compassionate to those who fear him.
¹⁴ For he knows how weak we are;
    he remembers we are only dust.”

I love those verses.  “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west”.  God doesn’t make a list of wrongs that He keeps in the back of His mind so He can remind us of how pathetic we are.  In fact, He has forgotten completely about them. And the reason for all that is that God loves us.  His love “is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth”.  

It’s when I ponder on those verses, that I know deep down in my soul that I need to be more like that.  I know I’m human (and so does God – “For he knows how weak we are”), and so I will mess up, but my goal is to become more like Him, more like Jesus.  So, I need to be willing to forgive and not carry grudges.   Sometimes, God reminds me of this, when I’m fuming over something someone has done.  In my head I’m going over how many times this person has ‘ticked me off’.  It’s usually when I’m fuming the most, that the sudden reminder comes into my thoughts – Audrey, you are forgiven. So what are you going to do about this?

Valentine's Day, our cultural Love Day is not as beautiful and easy as we'd like it to be. When we look at what God says love is ...

"Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance."

It's a challenge to think about. How do I love my husband/wife, my family, my friends?

Our song for today is How Deep the Father's Love for Us by Selah.