Love must hang all its hopes on GOD, by laying a hold on His promises, otherwise love will stop loving. Only the promises of God offer us the sure hope that every act of love will be eternally rewarded. We dare to love and to keep loving because He who is love and can not lie, has promised to reward us. Some of our best attempts to love will either fall short of what we had hoped to give or what someone else had hoped to receive, that is the nature of things in this world where fallen & flawed people interact with each other. If you set your hopes on my reponse to your acts of love, you will be disappointed. If I pin my hopes in this life on the fact that you will receive with tears of joy and gratitude my every attempt to love you, and that none of my motives will ever be misunderstood or questioned, I will be quickly and terribly discouraged. In short, if our motivations and decisions to love and keep loving are based on the reactions and responses of the objects of our love, that love will be as short lived as our disappointment will be prolonged. I will fail you, and you will fail me, but God will eventually and eternally fulfill every promise He has ever spoken.
If we are to love as God calls us to, if the church is to be that light that illuminates the greatness, glory and faithfulness of God, then we simply have to set our hopes on something that has never fallen and is unflawed, perfect in all its ways; and that something is the very Person of God.
But, how do we do that? How, in every day ways, do we go about setting our hope and placing our faith in God, Whom we have never seen? It is done by taking ahold of His promises in scripture and acting on them. Our faith in Him as a perfect Father, enables us to have faith in every word He has ever spoken. Simply put, we believe God's every word because we believe in the perfect, flawless character of God. So, if we are ever to love, and keep loving the way God commands, and as Jesus demonstrated and taught with his loving, sacrificial life and death, we will have to do it on the basis of being confident (faith is really confidence) that one day He will eternally reward us for our steadfast obedience and continued faith in Him.
In this world, loving acts will forever be misunderstand, questioned and rejected. We do not need to look any further than the life and death of Christ to realize this. But loving acts done by faith on the solid foundation of God's promises will never fail to eventually provide the reward that God's Word hold out to us. This is why the Bible speaks of God's promises as being "exceedingly great and precious...". Go ahead and love, and keep loving. Will you be hurt? Yes! Misunderstand? Constantly! Rejected? Occasionally! But look beyond them, and look unto God instead, for He Himself is your exceeding, great reward.
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