Learning to Love Others

What verses have most helped you understand what the love of God looks like?

Several months ago, we memorized 1 John 4:19 as a family: “We love because he first loved us.”

Lately, we’ve been memorizing Jesus’s words in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

We’ve talked about this verse a lot in times of sibling squabbles, trying to help the boys learn to look to Jesus, who laid down his life literally on the cross, but also in a million smaller ways throughout his life. We talk with them about how we can show the love of God to each other by choosing to lay aside our own desires and rights. And I’ve repeated it to myself plenty of times of the past few weeks when laying down my needs and preferences and rights was the last thing I felt like doing (and maybe even less than I felt like I deserved?? Yikes.).

The Spirit is beginning to bring some fruit from our time memorizing these verses, and we’d like to continue with our boys in this same theme of looking to God’s love to know how to love each other.

So tell me: What verses have most formed your understanding or experience of God’s love, or what verses were a lightbulb for you (or for your kids) as you learned to love others with the love God has shown us?