Have you “learned how to love?” God is Love and He expresses it perfectly in every way but we are still in the learning process! I confess that some days I think I have forgotten most of what I have learned when I realize how poorly I have acted or reacted to a situation which demanded more of me than I was willing to give.

God so loved this world, that He gave us Jesus. Jesus so loved us that He willingly laid down His life for each one of us. Most of us will never have to literally lay our physical lives down, but we are called to daily be “a living sacrifice” for Him. I want to crawl down off of that sacrificial altar sometimes. Not loving my own life is quite a challenge.

The good thing about learning anything is that when you have a way of measuring your progress, you know that you really are learning. In school or even in many work situations, the way of measuring how much you have learned is through testing. If you are taking a math course, the test will be mathematic questions related to the material you just studied. If you are a real estate agent who desires to broker your own company, more education is necessary. Once you have learned the material, you are then tested. If you pass the test, you are then qualified to apply for your broker’s license.

Learning to love also involves tests from time to time. The familiar passage in I Corinthians 13 gives us a good definition of some of the dynamics of what this love is supposed to look like in our everyday lives. The very first description of this kind of love is “patience.” The dictionary defines patience as the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset. I don’t know about you, but I have failed that test many times. The New King James uses the word “suffers long” in the place of patience. In other words, even if the testing goes on a long time, true godly love keeps on loving without a bad attitude. When you are training a child to do something they have never done before, you allow them to make mistakes until they finally get it. You should not get angry with them as they are learning a new skill but rather encourage them to keep trying. Why is it we seem to have patience with a young child learning how to walk and yet when an adult we may know does not respond the way we think they should we may get short tempered or even angry?

Most of us think that in order for our lives to really amount to something, we have to do something that the world recognizes as worthwhile. But over the years I have heard or read stories of little known individuals who have made a difference in their little tiny sphere of influence. When I was still in college I remember reading “One Solitary Life.” Someone (Danny Hahlbohm) penned this about the life of One who changed the world.

“He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30. Then, for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn’t go to college. He never lived in a big city. He never traveled 200 miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only 33 when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave, through the pity of a friend. Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. All the armies that ever marched, all of the navies that ever sailed, all of the parliaments that ever sat, all of the kings that ever reigned — put together — have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life.”

He entrusted the message of the Kingdom to a few mostly unknown and uneducated men who were so impacted by His love for them, that they were willing to give their own lives as martyrs. They were “love slaves” to the One who had freed them from the tyranny of self. It is said of them in the early part of Acts that those religious leaders who opposed them, “knew that they were uneducated men who had been with Jesus” and that “they were turning the world upside down.”

Each one of us can have that same kind of impact in our own sphere of influence. It is not how much you know or how talented you are that can really affect lives for eternity. Rather, it is living the life of love in front of those who cross our path on a regular basis.