The Point #163 - The Pain of Unrequited Love

There is a pain that is not often discussed - loving others without being loved back. We continue our lesson in the life of Christ in the Gospels today with this important, difficult topic. I hope to be an encouragement to you today. You are loved! You CAN keep loving as God loves, with His help!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, friends. I am speaking again to you today about lessons I've learned in the Bible through the way Jesus acted, taught, and thought in the four gospels while he lived on earth. I cannot speak for anyone else, but let me tell you that when I speak on an audio, and you get this either in email or social media or on my podcast, what I am speaking about is something that God has put in my heart, usually in the last few days, or something that has helped me because of an experience I have personally had. I do not speak on audio or when I'm teaching Sunday school or when I'm speaking out at a ladies' meeting about anything because I've read it simply in a book or I've learned something that I have not personally experienced. I myself cannot do that. I want to give tips that have personally impacted my life or that the Holy Spirit has personally been teaching me. So whenever I speak to you, I'm usually talking about things I had to learn the hard way and I have done wrong. And that is why I'm passionate about what I say when I speak to you. This is a tough topic. I'm speaking today about how to love when you do not feel that love reciprocated back to you. Especially if you are, I'm talking about love in a marriage. If you are trying to love your husband well and you do not feel loved in return. Or if there is a time in your child's life, and quite possibly this is as a teenager or young adult or an adult child, you do not feel loved in return by that child. These are very painful feelings, very painful, can cause a lot of tears, can cause a lot of depression and grief. Let me first say this. That is a feeling, and that is a way that you think the other person feels. No one can know what is inside another person's head. They can hear their words, but they cannot know their thoughts and know their heart. It is impossible. So the first thing I will say about this topic, and oh, this topic is big and huge, and it's not just a small one-time uh audio, but just because you feel something very strongly, and I'm saying this about my own experience, does not mean that is the truth of how the other person feels. If you feel very alone and unloved, it is not necessarily a fact that that other person does not love you. Now, the feelings are just as painful because you do not feel that love. I understand that, and I have felt that, but I want to go to the example that we have in all things. God. The Bible verse is we love him because he first loved us. If you are in a situation, in a relationship or friendship, that you do not feel the other person loves you, then you have just put yourself in the category of how God loves. God loves first, and we know that God is highest, perfect, strongest, most powerful. Therefore, it doesn't make you better in any way than the other person because we are all sinful humans, we cannot compare ourselves to God. But in the scenario of who is doing the loving, if you are loving someone and they are not responding back to you, God knows that feeling because he is the first to love. So we can take our cues on how to love well from God because he loves this world. And there are billions of people in this world that do not know him and do not want to know him and do not believe in him and will never return his love. So if we have one or two people in our lives that are doing this to us, making us feel this way, imagine how God feels. And he does know, and he does not have to assume, like we do, what the other person is thinking. So let's go to God as our example because, first of all, the fact is the person that is loving first is the stronger lover. Not better. I'm not saying a condescending thing here, but no, that is an encouragement to you. If you are in a position to love someone who does not return your love, you are loving like God loves because he loves first. Now let's think of something else that God is, and he's different than us in this way. He is omniscient. That means he knows everything. He is omnipresent, he is everywhere at the same time, and he is all powerful, okay, all-knowing, all-powerful. He has all the strength to do anything in the world. Taking all of those things together, knowing the future, being powerful to change any circumstance, and being omnipresent, all of that, all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent. In spite of all of that, he loves us. That is what's called grace. He knows in the future we're going to let him down. He already knows the thoughts and intents of our heart, that even our righteousness is his filthy rags, that we have all have ulterior motives. We all are sinful and we cannot love him back with the pure love that he has for us. So I'm saying, first of all, let's take a minute and just praise God for his grace to love us, even though he's going to be disappointed by us, even though he's going to uh get a love returned that is so much less than what he gave out. That is the love of God. Can we mirror that in a very small way in our lives? If we do not feel the love of a husband returned to us, whether or not he actually loves you, but you don't feel it, can you give the grace that God gives you and love him with a steadfast love anyway? That's how God loves us. When your child, maybe teenager, 20-something, adult child ignores you, how they treat you feels disrespectful, treats you unlovingly, um, maybe will not call you or text you or come to visit you or return your calls, or um, maybe you send them a funny reel or a funny picture and they won't, they ghost you. They won't even give you a thumbs up or respond that they recognized that you reached out to them. This is real stuff that happens in life. Possibly they seem rude to you every time you talk to them. I'm talking about husbands, children, other uh maybe parents, maybe siblings, maybe neighbors, co-workers, uh people that you would want to consider your friends. And there's a rejection there. Can we take our cue from an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent God who still continues to love us unconditionally? Now we're not going to be able to do it like he does because he is love, it's part of his character and he's perfect. We are filled with sin in our DNA from the moment we're born. So it's we can't do it as well as he does, but with the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we can do, we can give the fruit of the spirit love to others and give them the grace to love them, even though we don't get loved back. I just want to give a shot, uh, maybe a B12 shot to my friends today. Friends, you can do this. You can love those in your life that you do not feel loved back by, because that's how God loves us, and God can help us do this. We don't know, this might not be forever, but it's not going to be resolved in human ways. Let me tell you what does not work: guilt tripping, pouting, criticizing behind someone's back, venting to all of our friends or on social media about how we feel about somebody else, deciding to withdraw our love from them, stop doing things for them to prove that you can't hurt me like this. Um, all of these are ways that will never work. Uh, the silent, stubborn, um fine attitude of okay, if that's how it's gonna be, I'll be the better person. But yeah, the other person feels the tension of that. That is not going to draw a relationship back together. Um, if you are a words person like I am, obviously, doing audios, and I'm a teacher, I'm a Sunday school teacher. Let me tell you, there's probably not anyone in the world that can verify better than this the truth of this statement. Talking it out loud over and over and over again, explaining yourself and how you feel and what you want and what you desire and da-da-da-da-da. Words, words, words, words. It's not gonna fix it. If it did, I would be the queen of all relationships because I have the most words. I might win. And let me tell you, it's like beating your head against the wall. It's not gonna solve it. Friends, we have an opportunity here to be Christ-like. We have an opportunity to do the hard thing. To be crucified is a very painful thing, and God tells us to be crucified with Christ. That means our Christ-likeness has to extend to doing hard things that he has done for us. The sad verses are he came unto his own and his own received him not. But as many as received him, so he's always looking for the positive, he's always looking for the way to keep loving, he's always looking for the way to never leave us, never forsake us. We can be that in someone else's life with the power of the Holy Spirit working through us, not in the power of positive thinking and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and we got this girl, and looking in the mirror and just being strong and tough it out. We got this, not that. That's not a permanent fix. It's silently waiting on the Lord, trusting him, giving this to God, and not allowing this to crush our lives, not allowing this relationship that is not what we want it to be to send us into despair. Giving it to God and letting it go and letting him continue to love through us. Friends, I love you so much. There is a pain that is very deep that is not talked about that much, and that is unrequited love. Even if the person themselves may think and say they love you, if you don't feel it, it feels the same as unrequited love. I am here to let you know that you are seen, you are heard, and I'm asking you to join me in loving like Jesus loves, in loving for a lifetime, in loving long term. This is the opposite of what culture is going to tell you, and modern society is gonna say, you deserve to be happy, you deserve to go out and live your own life and cut off everybody that doesn't treat you well. But if you want to live the Christ-like life, that doesn't mean everyone can just trample all over you and you have no boundaries and you have that's not the same thing, and you trust everyone. That's not the same thing. Don't give up on loving, though. Don't give up on loving. Christ continues to love us even though he knows about us, even though he has the power to change us, he restrains himself and gives us free will. Even though he is omnipresent and knows how many times we're going to fail him in the future, it doesn't change his love for us. This is something supernatural that we can access only through the power of the Holy Spirit loving others through us. And that's the crux of everything about this podcast. Walking in love means loving God through loving others, and we need his help to do it because without him we could do nothing. I love you, friends. I hope you have a great week. Show Christ to somebody else through how you love them.