You Must I

1 Peter 1:22 “You must keep on loving with all your heart.” [CEV, with emphasis]

Paul says you and I “…must keep on loving with all your heart”. When I read this I had to ask God to help me. You must keep loving not with a part of your heart but with all your heart. The question is how can one do that?  How do we keep on loving with all our hearts for a life time? If love is going to last, how do I make it last? What choices do I have to make? What do I have to do if love is going to last? These are the four things you and I must do:

If love is going to last I must listen with all my heart. It is important because listening is one thing that we do not like doing. We like talking. In fact, sometimes we enjoy hearing our own voices. However, a lot will be different if only we would listen to one another. James 1:19 “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” God gives us amazing guidance. If only all marriages were to implement these three things; slow to speak, slow to get angry, and quick to listen.

God is telling us to be quick to listen but sometimes we struggle with listening because we do not really know how to listen. One of the keys to listening is that you have to listen to them like they want you to say it and not like you want to hear it. We often listen to people like we want to hear it. We want people to talk the way we want to hear it. But God’s Word is telling us to listen to people the way they want to talk.

If you are in any relationship, take a marriage relationship for instance; you have to listen to your spouse the way they talk. In most cases the man is very direct with this communication while the women love to tell stories. In other words, they thrive in the details of the event. The way most men will respond to the question “how was your day?” is very different from the way most women will. But regardless of who is doing the listening and how the storyteller wants to tell it, to listen with all your heart means to listen to the story the way the storyteller wants to tell it. You can learn to listen with all your heart.

Prayer: Holy Spirit, give me a listening heart, in Jesus Name. Amen!