Tuesday, October 27, 2026
John 15:12–13 (ESV)
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
Reflection
Think for a moment about what kind of love you actually have the capacity to produce on your own. If you’re honest, most of your love is conditional, keeping score, waiting to see if it will be reciprocated. You love people who are easy to love, and even then, not consistently. This is the human condition: we are self-focused lovers trying to obey a self-sacrificing command.
That’s why Jesus doesn’t just give us an instruction in these verses. He gives us a model and a means. “Love one another, even as I have loved you.” The love he’s calling us to isn’t generated from somewhere inside us. It’s a love that flows out of what he has already done. He laid down his life for his friends, and we were not yet his friends when he did it. We were enemies, rebels, people who had nothing to offer him. He loved us when love made no logical sense.
This is where your hope for change lives. You don’t have the ability to manufacture greater love. But you have been loved with the greatest love there ever was. Every time you fail to love well today, run back to this truth: Christ laid down his life for you first. His love doesn’t wait for you to get it right. It transforms you from the inside, little by little, so that his sacrificial love becomes the pattern your own heart begins to follow.
Lord Jesus, thank you for loving me when I had nothing to give. Let your sacrifice be the well I draw from as I try to love others today.
Sources & attribution
Devotional from Morning Selah.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.