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Hello and welcome to Thinking About the Bible. Today we are thinking about the word love. I had a whole series on this earlier, Thinking About Love, but I want to think about this word a little bit more today, give you something to think about. We're not going to talk about the Greek term phileo that's translated as love. It's a famous exchange between Jesus and Peter and how that word plays into the other word that we think about, agape or agape, depends on who you learned your Greek from, is how do you pronounce the coin of Greek there. But anyway, I'm going to read to you from Matthew 5, 43 and following. Jesus, in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, you've heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be like your Father in heaven, since he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors do the same, don't they? And if you only greet your brothers, what more do you do? Even the Gentiles do the same, don't they? So then be perfect or complete, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. So love your enemy, be like the Father. What does the Father do? He treats people graciously, treats them well, regardless of who they are. So love is an emotion, in this case here, in this sense, and our emotions can follow. We talked about this before, but the agape, the self-sacrificial love that is being exemplified by Jesus Christ, and is being also shown by God to his creation. He loves his creation, loves his people in the sense that he will show grace to them. In the Greek, the term can mean to feel and exhibit esteem and goodwill to a person, to prize and delight in a thing. So to love those who are closest to us is somewhat easy, should be. We can express that love through service, through kind words, through encouragement. And the person that we may not get along with, that we might term an enemy, we love them in much the same way. Help them out, speak kind words, give encouragement. Those are the things that express Christ-like love. So I want you to think about love today, how you can be kind to people, even especially to those that may be you don't get along with normally. Show kindness to them, be an encouragement to them, find ways to help them in whatever task. Perhaps these are people that you know at work or whatever, but find ways to express the love of Jesus Christ, and this love that God talks about, the love that God exemplifies in his behavior towards all of creation. So thinking about the Bible, thinking about love. God bless you, we'll see you tomorrow.