A New Way to Love Your NeighborSample

BE RESILIENT: Love is Unrelenting

We’ve talked about how God’s way of loving others is curious (always learning), free (always forgiving), and brave (pushing through discomfort). So what’s the difference with resilient, unrelenting love?

Resilience requires us to be uncomfortable and initiate even when someone hurts us, but relentlessness does everything we’ve talked about over and over again—even when relationships continue to be challenging. It expresses love in all the ways we’ve talked about so far, but not just once or twice. It keeps at it for a lifetime. It continues expressing divine love in the next complicated situation, and the next, and the next.

How do we keep from quitting when the relationship feels too difficult?

It requires faith, which is confidence and patience. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The keywords are assurance and hoped. The word assurance speaks to confidence or certainty. The word hope speaks to a divine patience. It is a grounded anticipation and it definitely requires patience—which is another way of saying fortitude, perseverance, endurance, or an unrelenting will to keep going. It’s that thing in a person that just keeps at it, no matter what. It’s resilience—that ability to bounce back even after something hard happens. It is a reminder that faith, belief in the unseen, does not mean belief in the unknown.

You may be wondering why I used a verse about faith to talk about love. When we contemplate the love God calls us to exhibit, don’t we conclude that it requires faith? How can we, as finite, flawed human beings even believe that we can love the way God requires?

It demands faith. Faith is more than the belief in what God can and will do. It is equally the belief in what we can do with God. Not knowing something and not seeing something are two vastly different realities. This distinction is important because when we talk about the unrelenting nature of God's love and the love to which he's called us, we are not talking about an ignorant or uninformed love but a love that has proven itself time after time.

Understanding the necessity for confidence and patience and believing God is the source of both gives us the ability to love others with hope. It allows us to continue to love people when their actions don’t earn it. It’s a new way to love in a world overcome by doubt, cynicism, and abandonment when it gets too uncomfortable.