Since God is love and love comes from God and is perfectly demonstrated by God, we need to replicate love.

During His earthly ministry, the Bible tells us a lawyer approached the Lord and asked Him what is the greatest commandment. Jesus said “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, Jesus said, hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

We can see here, we are to replicate love. God perfectly demonstrated His love by Jesus dying on the cross for us. We replicate or return love to Him by loving Him with our whole being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. To do this we need to know what love is. We need a definition of love. How would you define love?

As you think of your definition of love, how does the world define love? If we were to take a clipboard and survey people, how would they define love? In different words than these, they would most likely say “Love is getting my needs met” or “Love is giving me what I want.” We see the self focus here.

Notice the words of 1 John 4:19. “We love Him because He first loved us.” When we examine the Scriptures and specifically 1 John 4:19, we find a biblical definition of love. Love is giving a person what they need.

How do we make that leap? How do we come to that definition? God gave us what we needed. We were lost; dead in trespasses and in sin. We needed a perfect sacrifice. We needed a Savior. He sent His only begotten Son to be our Savior; to be that perfect sacrifice. He gave us what we needed. To replicate the love of God we must ask …

• What does God need from me?
• What does my spouse need?
• What does my child need (or) What do my children need?
• What does _______________ need?

You get the idea. You can keep filling in the blank. You could keep asking those questions because we are to replicate the love of God. To love God and to love others we need to know what they need. To know what they need, we need to spend time with them and get to know them in the most personal way possible. That will lead us to replicating, repeating, and duplicating the love of God in wholesome and Christ honoring ways.