Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from a pure heart. I Peter 1:22

Thinking more about how to fight discouragement… I am realizing how easy it is to be discouraged by people and how very quickly we can grow weary in our relationships. We are all flawed, walking through our own trials and fighting our own battles with different personalities, communication skills, and habits. It is only by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in us that we can have success in loving others with a pure heart and genuine love.

So what do we do when we realize we are people-weary? Muttering negative comments about others to ourselves or closest friends, even if we have a loving smile and kind spoken words? Avoiding people? Desiring distance until they’ve made some progress in weak areas? Being resentful of how much we’ve loved others or done for them that has been unreciprocated? Feeling superior because we see what they need to do to have positive changes in their life and they just aren’t doing it? Desiring to speak ill of them to mutual friends?

These are some of the red flags we should take notice of that are telling us we are getting weary and our love is not genuine. We are starting to act hypocritical and self-focused… but more importantly, we are disobeying the Word, dishonoring Jesus, and grieving the Holy Spirit. We have most likely been trying to love in our flesh and have lost sight of who it’s all about.

We first remind ourselves that the Lord is SO clear in His Word: We show Him we love Him by how we love His children. We show the world we are His by how we love others.

So when we recognize that we are struggling to have love for others from Him, for Him, to Him…we must stop, drop, and repent: Get on our knees at His feet and confess the flesh that has been rising up in us and tell Him that we realize we have let our eyes drift away from Him and His love. We ask Him to FILL us to overflowing with His love and remind us of how undeservedly merciful and patient and kind He has been to us.

And then with this same love that He will remind us of, we vigilantly go after the fleshly, impure heart thoughts we’ve been having. Since every word we speak, whether muttered or clearly out loud, flows from the heart… we can’t just shut our mouths and the problem is fixed…we must take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ so He can do some heart work.

When we feel disgusted over a person and are “totally done”, we need to take that thought captive and pray earnestly for them.

When we have an envious thought, we grab it up and give it to the Lord and choose to rejoice with those who are rejoicing.

When all we can focus on is how selfish and fallen a person is, we capture those thoughts that are keeping us in the place of judge, and ask the Lord to please help this person know His love more and more so they can be free from themselves… and take out the log in our own eye.

When we are gnawing over a person’s callousness to us or how inconsiderate or hard-hearted they act, we ask the Lord to show us that hurting people, hurt people … and plead with Him to pour out His love into their hearts.

When we are trying to measure how much love to give a person based on what they’ve done for us or what they could do for us…. we lasso all that in and remind ourselves that we are not loving for ourselves or even for them… we are loving from Jesus, for Jesus.

And in every case, we pray pray pray in the Spirit. We pray for spiritual breakthroughs, we pray for an outpouring of His love, and for goodness for those we struggle with. The enemy is not of flesh and blood, right? And we continue this work of praying and taking the thoughts captive … and we don’t stop until our hearts are pure and He has changed us and we have actual humble, unselfish, pure love for these difficult people.

To be continued….