Sunday: September 6th, 2020
Romans 8:10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Harm refers to ‘Physical or mental damage that causes someone or something to be hurt, broken, made less valuable or successful’. From all angles therefore, harm does not appear to have any positive connotation and all associations with the word are negative. The reason for establishing this background is because of the challenging nature of the verse we read today “Love does no harm to a neighbour.”
The question I thought about after reading this text multiple times was this “if love does not do harm, then have we even loved at all so far? I got concerned because in the light of this text, as far as we can remember, our attempt at love has caused ‘harm’ to varying degrees. We have brought tears to the eyes of others and some have been left scarred.
In some instances, love has been our excuse for exaggerated correction and in other situations, love even becomes the weapon of choice. But beloved, we don’t have to feel disappointed because indeed we also love, only that our approach to love is yet to be perfected since there are weaknesses and obvious gaps in the way we love. Nonetheless, that is not to discourage us, it is to let us know that “there is a more excellent way”.
So let us keep on loving, following after the example of Christ and soon enough, we will walk into “His idea of love”- the perfect way.
#sly
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