Love Does by Bob Goff calls us out of merely thinking about loving people and into an adventurous life of expressing it. There may be a better way to follow God.

There is an exhilarating way to live life in Christ, and you might have been missing it entirely.

Let’s face it. We are bogged down by our mundane lives and weary of religion. What we need is a more authentic way to engage life and follow God. It will involve shifting our outlook on what matters and learning to be sensitive to the Spirit’s leading. Not only do we have an example of how to do this in the life of Christ, but also God is intentional to help us by overwhelming us with His love.

That love of His is not idle. As we see how active it is, we come to realize that it has to be expressed, which is precisely what He calls us to as our mission to the world. The time has come to stop waiting around wallowing in our boredom and show up ready to be used by Him.

In this summary, you will learn:

  • how one man actively engages life with God and the amazing consequences of those risks;
  • that following Christ is meant to be lived in real-time as we trust Him to lead us; and
  • why we must come to see “love” as a verb.

Love is active, atypical, and awe-inspiring.

There is a difference between trying to tweak or control others’ behavior and just being available for them no matter their choices. Love is not put off by a person’s decisions but chooses to stick with them through thick and thin. Knowing that someone is with us allows us to feel supported if our decisions prove foolish. It saves us from embarrassment. True friendship lets people be themselves.

Love comes alongside someone even if their choices might seem ridiculous to us. If the Christian life is truly about love, then it will be sacrificial in practice. It will go beyond saying or doing good things. Just like Jesus became incarnate, we have the opportunity to be present for others. That reveals the heart of Christ. Love takes action.

A life of faith will not fall in line with the rest of the world. Following Jesus is countercultural and abnormal. Jesus did life like that. He looked beyond people’s wants to their deeper needs and supplied those things. He chose to interact with folks rather than be passive. Jesus was real and practical. He wants us to be that way with others.

Church is not confined to a building. It is meant to be lived with those who long for Jesus too. if we want to have a flourishing relationship with God, we have to fight against the current of being similar to everyone else. Those who know Jesus recognize that they said goodbye to the mundane when they chose to follow Him. The closer we get to Jesus, the stranger our lives will look to our culture. The evidence of our love for Jesus is found in how we convey that love to people.

Real love cannot be limited to our minds only. It has to be vibrantly expressed. If it is genuine, it knows no bounds and does not care to let anything impede its revelation. In many ways, it does not obey the world’s rules. Love inspires others and invites them to join in a life of engagement rather than boring drudgery. It is dramatic and creative. This is the sweet and strong motivation of Christ’s love for His church. He woos us with the world He made and draws us to Himself at every opportunity.

Love cannot be easily dissuaded from its goals.

Prosperity in pointless things is far worse than messing up something important. God knows what He is doing when He allows us to fall flat on our faces. Even the way He orchestrated our lives to start as infants proves how His good plan includes our failures as we try to navigate life.

The disciples went through this too. They had years of “failure training,” which continued after Christ’s death. God uses our deficiencies to propel us into His plan, rendering us incapable of holding them up as an excuse for Him not to use us. Our lives will involve plenty of victories and setbacks, but He will always come to get us. We have to start processing the setbacks from His perspective.

Contrary to what we might think, we are incapable of coercing our life situations. In fact, God uses those situations to change our hearts. We can easily obsess over our longings. We confuse desires for needs, and then we wind up worshipping our desires. Sometimes they even replace God, or we completely miss His will.

Manipulating things does not serve us well. We have to trust God to choreograph our lives to serve His goal of sanctifying us. He will enact His plan for us with immeasurable grace, just like He always has. Thankfully, He corrects us in such a way that we look more like Him if we are willing to yield those longings to Him.

However, God is also looking for us to be zealous. Sometimes God wants to see if we will fight the good fight of faith instead of receiving our circumstances as they are. His Word is mighty, and so are those from people in positions of authority. Many of the things about which we are passionate please God. He very likely planted those passions in us so He could receive glory from them as we pursue them. We can even encourage each other in the direction that God is leading through the same power of communicated words. Love speaks…

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