I love the way Jesus was calling people to follow Him.
He calls them; they will come and follow Him. If they choose not to follow Him, He lets them go because True Love and force or manipulation doesn’t go together.
One day, when Jesus told to all His followers the Truth as it was, He lost most of them (John 6). They just turned around 180 degrees and said “adios” and left.
Imagine there were more than five thousand people. They all deserted Him except His Disciples. In today’s term, He had 5,000 likes on His Facebook page and within a half hour sermon, 4,988 people who liked His page decided to “Unlike” it. That is a disaster.
But for Jesus, it was not a disaster at all. He actually loved those people so much that He let them go. Jesus didn’t come back and say “It is a silly mistake on my part for saying what I just said few minutes ago. It is a slip in my tongue. This will never happen again.”
Oh, Beloved Jesus didn’t apologize for what He told them, because that was the only Truth they needed to hear from Him and that was the only reason He was with them. Jesus loved His Disciples so much that He also gave them a right to choose or reject Him because of His message. So He asked them: “Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?”” John 6:67
If their answer had been “Yes, we want to go away”, He would have sent them away too. Why? Because He loved them!
How can a loving God just say “Goodbye” to His followers whom He loved the most?
You see the others left because they didn’t want to hear the truth. So, if Jesus wanted them to stay with Him, He had to stop telling them the Truth, the Truth that had (still has) power to free them from the power of sin; the very and the only one thing they needed to hear in this life.
Jesus’ love only expressed through Truth. And not expressing that love is something IMPOSSIBLE for Him to do because Jesus was (and still is) that Truth, the Love they didn’t want to hear.
So, He loved them so much that He said “No” to stop loving them. Rather He continued loving them as He let them go.
“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13) He chose to rejoice with the Truth by saying “Goodbye” to those who hated the Truth. He loved them by saying “Goodbye” to them who hated Love.
Yes, true love, not only says “I love you” but it also says “Goodbye” for the good of that person who is being loved.
Perhaps, have you ever heard a woman saying, “I can’t leave him because I love him”, knowing that the guy otherwise won’t stop his destructive behavior? If she had true love for him, she would have left him a long time ago so that he would have come into his senses to seek help from others.
A girl once said: “My boyfriend wants sex because he loves me. And I can’t say ‘No’ because I love him.” This girl is not talking about love; she is talking about lust after sexual sin because love always PROTECTS (1 Corinthians 13) and none of these two people are doing life for the purpose of protecting one another but to fulfill their fleshly, temporal and sinful desires.
So a man who has true love for a girl says “Goodbye” to her if she demands sex before marriage because he loves her so much that he chooses to suffer with sexual temptation than to be given over to them and see the girl he loves being hurt by the consequence of lust. In the same way, a girl who has true love for a man says “Goodbye” to him who advances towards her for sex because she loves him so much that she can’t see him burn up with “the wildfire” of sexual sin.
So, if you are single and seeing someone, test your love against the nature of True Love as it is recorded on 1 Corinthians 13. If you have to say “Goodbye” to someone because you love him/her so much, go ahead and say it. You will never miss True Love in your life. Listen to God’s Word: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.” Ecclesiastes 11:1 ///