From the YouVersion Bible App Devotional, “Advent, Day 22”

3 Ways to Show Love Today

Over the last few days, we’ve looked at love as following Jesus’ example by treating everyone as valuable and worthy of sacrificial care. But when we reflect on our own approach to loving others, we might recognize areas where we’re more selfish than we are selfless. Or where we’re more concerned about treating people we like as valuable, but struggle to see the value in people who are different from us.

Instead, Ephesians 4:15 encourages us to speak the truth in love. You can advocate for what’s right from a place of respect, honor, and humility, regardless of the topic. This looks like being curious, listening to understand (not to respond with the perfect rebuttal), and remembering that everyone at the dinner table is made in God’s image.

Often, the way God calls us to love others is opposite from what we know or what culture says is right. Love is a process, and it takes time to adopt the ways God calls us to love others. But we all have a step we can take today and this holiday season.

Here are three ways you can show love to those around you right now.

1. Stand up for what’s right.

The holiday season can be a time when tensions run high. We all probably have that one uncle (or aunt, or cousin, or neighbor—you get the idea), who will bring up a hurtful topic at the dinner table. When this happens, the tendency might be to correct the behavior or ignore it altogether, and neither of those options are loving.

When you do, you’re bringing value and dignity to the people around you, and to those who might not ever know they were a topic of conversation.

2. Be generous toward others.

Last week, we looked at generosity through the lens of joy, and how it also influences how we show love to others.

Generosity is sharing what you have to help someone else. This includes our money, but also everything else we have. In a time of year when consumerism can run wild, you can pause and take inventory of what you have. What gifts or passions do you have that might bless someone around you? How could you leverage finances as a tool to show God’s love to someone in need?

When you practice generosity, you’re checking your heart’s posture to ensure it’s aligned with God’s. It can help you be more conscious as you make your holiday purchases and help you to be more aware of the people around you.

3. Know when to practice boundaries.

As we consider the sacrificial care we’re called to show others, it’s important to recognize the difference between love and enablement. Occasionally, there will be situations when we need to love from afar.

However, boundaries can also help us identify how we let others into our lives. Instead of drawing hard and fast lines and kicking people out of our lives completely, we can choose how we engage with them. In doing so, we’re able to best show up with love toward everyone we interact with.

As Christmas gets closer, consider one way you can show love to others through one of these three ways.

Pause and Pray:

Heavenly Father, thank You for loving me with an unconditional, unwavering love. I want to be someone who shares Your love with everyone I meet, but sometimes that feels difficult when I’m stretched thin, overwhelmed, or burned out. Please give me everything I need to love the people around me well today and always. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Speaking the truth sounds easy, but it is especially difficult if the person to whom you feel you must speak is someone that does not like to hear the truth. This is something I need to practice. I tend to avoid confrontation with most people and I am finding more and more that I am doing them a disservice by not saying how I feel or how their opinion or lifestyle does not line up with God’s expectations for them. I need boldness. How about you? And I need to know how to combine that boldness with love.

In this season of giving, everyone is scurrying around trying to find the perfect gift and then getting frustrated when you find it and it’s all sold out or not available until after the holiday. The perfect gift is the one given from your heart, just as God gave Jesus as His gift to us. And He is always available.

We learn to love by living through Jesus. He resides in our hearts because we invite Him in, and then daily He gives us directions about the way we should go through life, if we are only attentive and listening.

Love is not always easy. Understatement, right? Yet we are called to love. There are some people in my life who are easy to love. They agree with most of my opinions, are kind and generous and loving to me. And then there are the disagreeable ones, those who don’t tell me what I want to hear and who are generally the cloud in my sunshiny day. But God says to love because Jesus loved…not because we feel like it, but because He gave us that example and we are to follow it.