Have you
ever had someone claim to love you, while the person was clearly hurting
you without cause? Now, that "without cause" is an important part in this.
Keeping that in mind, that it is without cause, this person has been
causing great emotional pain and all the while claiming to love you. How
can that be?
Well, the easiest explanation is that the person is
lying. But what if the person is not lying, what if the person truly does
love you, but his/her actions say quite the opposite? How is this
explained?
Let's take a look at perhaps the most known verse on
love in the bible, John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life." This single verse shows us the emotional love
(a noun) and action love (a verb). Because
God had such a love for us, He sent His only begotten Son to save us. He
acted on His emotional love for us, and that action was an act of love.
Scripture also shows that God commands us to love Him first and
then to love each other. God would only command us to "do" something that
we can "do," something that is an action, a verb. And considering
that we are made in the image of God, it stands to reason that we can only
take action to love someone, if we already emotionally love that person.
Because we love someone, we are able to love that person in action,
in deed. And there's a reason that God had to command us to love others,
and that is because we are capable of loving someone emotionally but
not acting on that love. If acting on that love just came naturally, we
would not need a commandment telling us to do so. And when we do not act
on that emotional love and love a person in our actions, then we fail to
actively love that person. This is how a person can claim to love us, and
possibly truly does love us, emotionally, but not in his/her actions.
Now, I could go on and on here, just for the sake of making this
longer, but that really is it in a nutshell. What I will add here is that
when someone appears to emotionally love you but is not acting on that
love (and should be), then that person is walking in the flesh, and all
the begging in the world is not going to make things right. It is God who
works in each of us, not us. We do not work in others. Oh, we can share
the word of God with others, but that's all. However, we can hold onto the
scripture that tells us that His word will not return void. So, share the
word, then take comfort. And if the person who is harming you clearly
shows no desire to work things out with you and seek to live peaceably
with you in this life (no matter what the relationship is with this
person), then walk away, let go. Perhaps
there will be a new relationship with that person someday when he/she
stops walking in the flesh. But don't live for that. Live for God and only
God. We are to love God first and then others. Make your ways pleasing to
God, not man.