The Lord’s insight. Love is kind; it is not tough.
1 Corinthians 13:4: “Love suffers long and is kind.”
John 15:12: “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
I’m sure you have heard people speak of “tough love,” or you may have used the idea of tough love yourself, but love is not tough at all. God made love the cornerstone of everything. We are to first love the Lord with all our hearts and with all our souls. Then we are to love others as we love ourselves.
The Lord wants us to abide or to live in His love. Part of the reason for this is that we can learn to love in all things, to love at all times and to be love towards all people. Just like believing in Him is not made difficult for us to do, loving Him and others is not tough. It is easy.
So, how then did the idea of “tough love” find its way into how many believers suggest we should interact with others sometimes? Perhaps it’s because in some ways we may want people to deserve our love because of the things they do to us. But God did not ask us to earn His love, so we ought not to think that others must earn or be deserving of our love. There are three things to consider with love: Love is not tough; Loving is not tough; and Being love is not tough.
Love is not tough. Love is kind. Things that are kind are not tough things at all. If you live in the Love of the Lord, you live in the kindness and in the grace and in the mercy of the Lord. It may be tough for you to love because you want to bring a consequence to someone, but this does not make love tough. You may want to withhold kindness and grace and mercy until a person accepts personal fault, but this is not love.
Thinking this way simply makes “tough love” a pretense for love when it is really selfishness and condemnation and the like that you want to be received as love. It may be tough for you to accept the kindness of Love, but love is never tough because you are tough. You don’t protect yourself with “tough love.”
Loving is not tough. We are called to love God with all our hearts and to love others as ourselves. Loving God and loving others then is not tough. God did not make something so crucial to our relationship with Him and others to be difficult for us to do. Loving Him and loving others is easy and it should be as natural as loving our own selves. Loving is not tough because Love is not tough. You are loving because you are Loved.
Being love is not tough. 1 Corinthians 13 says that love is patient, it doesn’t envy, it is not selfish, it does not behave rudely, and it thinks no evil. If you listen to this scripture, it tells you that love is something that lives more than it is something that we just do. Being love is not tough, so manifesting the things that come from being love is not tough. If being love is tough for you, perhaps it is because you are simply trying to do loving things, but you are not being a loving person.
So then, love is not tough, loving is not tough, and being love is not tough. Perhaps then, we should consider if the idea of tough love should be something we embrace. Ephesians 4:15 tells us that love is intended to unify not to divide. We are to speak the truth to one another in love so that we come closer together.
But let’s make sure we speak the truth more than we speak our feelings. Your feelings may not be the truth. Your feelings just may be your need to hurt others in love rather than to speak the truth in love. If what you say to others is not intended to love and to bring unity, perhaps it’s something you should keep to yourself.
Love is never tough to give; it is never tough to receive; and it is never tough to be. What is tough is for us to learn that we don’t need to express all our hurt and pain that others may cause us simply because we want them to know how we feel. Love spoken in anger is not love. You can always forgive others for their hurts even if you do not share with others you are hurt.
This is the strength of Love. Love can love easily and always even in the middle of pain.
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