How broadly does your love function in real life? I don’t mean the pseudo-spiritual, feelings-based, words-only, churchy kind of love. What about Christ-like love toward those kind of people who do not commended themselves easily to being love? Sometimes we can be put off by the superficial, by something as thin as the look of a person’s appearance. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the articular Russian author observes,  “… the face of a man often hinders many people not practiced in love, from loving him.” (from “The Brothers Karamazov”).

Christlike love sees beyond the face, the posture, the clothes, the demeanor, the behaviors, the character. Love loves even the unlovely, and transforms the unlovely into beauty. After all, that is the kind of love with which God loves us. And Scripture is absolutely clear, “We love because he first loved us.”

“By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 Jn 4:9–11)

Who in your life right now needs Christlike love through you, someone whose looks do not easily commend themselves to your love? Maybe that is the very one whom God is calling you to love today!