Our loveliness blossoms out of the love of God for us and in us, and it is affirmed and magnified and publicly displayed in the love we have for one another. It stands before the watching world as an invitation: come and see God’s love displayed.

Loving the People God Loves
What God loves, we must love. Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:1–2). If we are beloved children, we must walk in Christlike love for his people. Repeatedly in the New Testament, God calls the members of his beloved church to love one another.1 Love for the church ought to be a fundamental characteristic of our lives. You have a people. They are your local church. And our love ought to mirror God’s love in three important ways.
1. Loving the Unlovely
Since the fall of Adam, sin has made everyone unlovely. Listen to some of the words that the Bible uses to describe fallen people: enemies (Rom. 5:10), strangers (Eph. 2:12), rebels (Ezek. 20:38), and haters (Rom. 1:30); impure (Eph. 5:5), disobedient (Eph. 2:2), hopeless (Eph. 2:12), and ignorant (Rom. 10:3). Our sin not only makes us repulsive; it rightly places us under God’s wrath and displeasure (Eph. 2:3). There is nothing attractive about any of this. But, thankfully, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). When we were unlovely, God loved us. We did nothing to deserve his love, but he loved us anyway. In what might seem like circular reasoning, God explains his love for his people this way: “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you” (Deut. 7:7–8). God loves his people because of his own eternal, sovereign, good pleasure and nothing else. His love is “uncaused, un-purchased and unconditional.”2 His love is “uninfluenced.”3
He loves us because he loves us. So we love God’s people simply because God loves them. Hear the words of the apostle John: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11). God’s people are not always lovely. Every one of us can be thoughtless, immature, unkind, foolish, and repeatedly snared by sin. And those are just our obvious failings. We probably don’t even know the worst about the people in our church. But God does, and he loves us anyway. When Christ hung on the cross, he died for each particular sin of each particular person the Father had given him. There is no sin of his people yet to be discovered by the Lord and nothing that can disqualify his true children from his love. As we walk in love for the local church, our love models the love of God himself. There was nothing lovely in us that caused God to love us, so we don’t wait for God’s people to seem attractive in order to love them. If God in his sovereign good pleasure has set his love on these people from eternity past, uniting them to his Son and gathering them into his church, then it is our privilege to love them too.
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On Sunday morning after church, ask a young child one of these questions. You can begin with one of the questions designed to simply get to know him or her and move toward one of the questions that engages his or her faith. Whatever you ask, it will probably be the start of a great conversation, and it might even awaken love for the church in the next generation.

Creating a Conversation
When I was a kid, the longest part of Sunday morning wasn’t the drive to church, the Sunday school hour, or even the worship service. The longest part of Sunday morning was the time after the service when all the grown-ups stood around and talked. My stomach was rumbling, my shiny Mary Janes had begun to pinch my toes, and many of my friends had already left. And yet Mom and Dad kept talking. And talking. And talking.
Several feet shorter than the conversing groups of adults, I often felt invisible, amusing myself by twirling around my mom’s legs, down near the floor where nobody bothered to look. Heard from my knee-high position, this grown-up conversation, like the “mwahhmwahhmwahh” of the adults in a Peanuts movie, was unintelligible at worst and uninteresting at best.

But every so often, one of those adults would stop talking to my mom or dad and would bend down on my level. The church member would look me in the eye, smile, and ask a question to me. All of a sudden, I’d forget my hunger and my shoes. I’d forget my boredom. This person thought I was important! This person wanted to know me!

Forming the Next Generation Starts Now
As churches everywhere shake their heads in frustration over declining commitment among younger generations, we need to remember that a person’s commitment to the church is often formed early.
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Make Kids Feel Valued. Say “I’m so glad you’re here!” Give kids a high five, fist bump, or handshake (a kid-appropriate “holy kiss,” 2 Cor. 13:12). Take time to stop and listen when kids tell stories about their week. Carry mints or other small treats to give to kids (with parent permission). In these small ways (and many more) we honor our Lord Jesus, who welcomed little children, affirmed their value in his kingdom, and commanded us to make it easy for them to come into his presence (Matt. 19:14).

My kids decided they wanted to commit to our current church well before my husband and I did. On our first visit, our three young boys were met by teenagers who offered fist bumps, Sunday School teachers who introduced themselves with a smile, and a church elder who taught them the secrets of his signature sleight-of-hand trick.
The church didn’t have children’s ministry staff or polished kids’ programs. What it did have was people who liked kids. And that was more than enough for my children. 
In the years since, the congregation members have continued to express love for my kids in dozens of ways. My boys have grown into teenagers, and have been joined by a younger sister, but they still know who is prepared to give them a LifeSaver and who is always up for a discussion of the big game yesterday. They also know who is praying for them. As a result, they walk into church on Sundays believing they belong. The little things members did when they were small taught them to expect to be included and valued every Sunday—no matter how old they get.
Whatever the size or resources of your church, it can be a place where little kids know they are welcome. Just like adults, kids in the church flourish when they are known, loved, served, and engaged. And it often doesn’t take much.
Consider 25 tiny ways to welcome kids in church.
Know (Make Kids Feel Seen)

Smile.
Look kids in the eye.

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The reason we must be patient with other Christians, according to Paul, is love. In 1 Thessalonians 5:14, he grounds his command to long-suffering in the terms of family affection, identifying the believers as “brothers and sisters.” In the church, we are not mere acquaintances, or even fellow members of the same club; we are family. In the church, Christ’s love for us compels us to love one another (John 13:34).

One by one, each of my children learned a catechism question that asks, “Have you a soul as well as a body?” And the answer, as it slowly and deliberately arose from tiny toddler lips, always tugged at my heart: “Yes, and my soul will never die.”
Though designed for children, this question and answer trained me as a parent. Whatever frustrations the child had caused me that day — spilled milk, broken toys, incessant questions, delayed naps — couldn’t continue to annoy me when I stopped to remember that the small person in front of me possessed an undying soul.
We become impatient with others when we fail to see that they have significant and lasting value. When they interrupt us, dawdle over their own responsibilities, or require more time and energy than we had planned to allow them, we start to consider them inconveniences. We become so focused on their behaviors in the moment that we don’t consider their value in eternity.
And when we fail to recognize other people as eternally important, we will not love them well. In Paul’s famous love chapter, he begins his list of love’s qualities with this simple declaration: “Love is patient” (1 Corinthians 13:4). In order to love someone, we must value that person’s undying soul more than we value our own temporary convenience.
God Is Patient
This, of course, is how God loves. In his second epistle, Peter writes,
Beloved . . . the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3:8–9)
It seems that some of the members of the first-century church were becoming impatient — with God. Why hadn’t Jesus returned? Why weren’t their persecutors being judged? Why weren’t God’s promises fulfilled immediately? Why was God being so slow? Because, Peter explained, God cares about souls. God knows, much more than we do, the horrors of hell. He knows the dreadful extent of his own wrath. And he wants people to be saved.
God, who could justly destroy the earth at any moment, has chosen to wait. He is “the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). He is not bothered by the passing of time — by the minutes and years and millennia that are ticking away — if it means that people will be eternally saved.
In his saving purposes for his elect people, God doesn’t measure time the way we do: “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Unlike us, God isn’t focused on the clock.
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In the end, God always keeps perfect time. He never underestimates the amount of time it will take to accomplish a goal or to bring about a certain result. He never misjudges his own ability; he never miscalculates the moment to act. Because he is sovereign over all, his plans and purposes unfold precisely when they should, at the very moment he decreed from eternity past. Every one of God’s works happens exactly on time.

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. (Ps. 40:1)
What is  patience?  It may be a familiar word, but I suspect we’re more likely to define it by what it’s not than what it is. Patience, we think, is not pacing the room while I wait for that important phone call.  It’s not fussing at  my dawdling  teenager or honking at the elderly driver in front  of me. Patience is not grumbling, fretting, or exploding when I experience a delay. But the Bible also presents patience as a positive virtue. It’s not merely the absence of sin; it’s the pursuit of righteousness. Today we’ll see that patience is waiting on the Lord. The Lord is sovereign over the circumstances and people in our lives; ultimately, he is the one who causes us to wait, and he brings our waiting to an end. We practice patience by looking in faith to him.
In Psalm 40, David is stuck. He’s trapped in a “pit of destruction” and floundering in a “miry bog” (v.  2). The psalm doesn’t explain exactly what David’s swamp was; it could have been a work struggle or a relational mess. It could have been both. But, whatever the circumstances, David’s response was to cry out to God and then wait. And because he studied God’s Word and works (vv.  5, 7–8), meditated on God’s kindness and mercy (vv. 6, 11), and diligently participated in corporate worship (vv.  9–10), David waited with hope. We can learn from his example. Whether we are stuck in unmet desires or tangled in financial worries, we can call on our Lord. We can seek to know him as he is revealed in his Word. And we can trust he will do what is best.
In the end, God always keeps perfect time. He never underestimates the amount of time it will take to accomplish a goal or to bring about a certain result. He never misjudges his own ability; he never miscalculates the moment to act. Because he is sovereign over all, his plans and purposes unfold precisely when they should, at the very moment he decreed from eternity past. Every one of God’s works happens exactly on time.
This is why David could say in another psalm, “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (27:14).  Our souls should be encouraged when we realize it’s God we’re waiting on. Unlike fallible people, God has never had to rush in and say to anyone, “I’m so sorry I kept you waiting.” If the Lord delays, it’s not because he miscalculated.  We can wait with hope, knowing he has wisely determined that this precise period of waiting is the best thing for our good and his glory.
Let your heart take courage.
Taken from Patience: Waiting With Hope, by Megan Hill, a recent release from P&R Publishing. Used with permission.