How To Have More Love

The Anna Szabo Show

How To Have More Love is the last podcast from "What Is Love?" series. Access all episodes here: https://onlinediscipleshipforwomen.com/what-is-love/

YOU deserve more love! Do you agree? Watch my love series on YouTube: http://bit.ly/WhatIsAgapeLove

Imagine what life would be like if YOU could HAVE more love and if you could FEEL loved more often….

Let me just ask you once again so you visualize it for yourself right now:

Imagine what life would be like if YOU could HAVE more love and if you could FEEL loved more often….

That’s what today’s episode is all about! Let’s talk about it!

As you know, today is our last episode of WHAT IS LOVE? series http://bit.ly/WhatIsAgapeLove, so let’s recall what we have talked about so far:

1/13 20 Love Lessons Learned in 35 Years

1/20 1 Cor 13 explained with a practical real-life example of love

1/27 Agape love in the Bible

02/03 My love dare test results and what I’ve learned about my own Love skills

02/10 My Love dare journey - how I learned to practice love

02/17 Lovability (what is it and how can you get more love using it?) with Katharine Pike

02/24 How we love: 5 love styles and how we GIVE love

03/03 The 5 love languages and how we RECEIVE love

03/10 How to feel more love and how to feel loved more often

If you’ve been a loyal listener, I know by now you already know that what I’ve learned on my own journey of sharpening my love skills is that to FEEL more love, you need to improve YOUR lovability, which is YOUR ability TO love.

So, where do we GET more love TO improve our ability to love?

I mean TO give love to someone else, we must first HAVE it. Right?

TO have it, we need to GET love somewhere. Do you agree?

So, what’s that place where we go to GET more love to GIVE more love?

John 13:34 says this:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

So, what’s that place where we get love from to give it to others? Jesus. And His love for us.

I will tell you: this is the opposite of what our culture teaches us with all the swiping left and right of dating apps and hook up apps, where we, human beings, are TRAINED to treat one another as a commodity.

I remember late last year as Michel and I were preparing for another court hearing, she with a little irritation said to me: I can’t believe you’re still in love with him, I would have already forgotten all about him!

I was stunned. And I told her: I am NOT in love with Michel. Being IN love and lovING are not the same at all. I love him intentionally, genuinely, and wholeheartedly because I’ve learned TO love him, I’ve trained myself during this marriage to practice love toward him because God loves ME so much, not because Michel doesn’t love me.

It was such a profound conversation! It’s THE most important aspect of love to remember:

TO have more love, to increase YOUR lovability, you don’t dwell on how others practice love toward YOU. You dwell on how Jesus practiced love toward you. You ponder not the actions of others toward you. You ponder the loving actions Jesus took to show, to demonstrate, to prove His love for you.

Jesus gave His life so YOU can have yours. He bled and died so YOU are free to live and love. He sacrificed His everything on the cross, including His life, so you have a life and have love.

1-corinthians 13:4-8 says this:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Who EVER loved YOU like this? Jesus. And that’s how He asks you to love others.

On 1/20 our podcast episode was called “1 Cor 13 explained with a practical real-life examples of love” and you can go listen to it on YouTube.com/AnnaSzaboJDMBA and ponder some more.

So, I promised that by the end of this series you will know for sure how you can HAVE more love. HOW?

You immerse yourself in studying, understanding, and appreciating the love of Jesus for YOU.

From that place of a happy heart, a healed heart, from that place of deep gratitude for the unconditional love Jesus loves YOU with… you can then love others, meaning you can have more love by increasing YOUR lovability, your own ability to love. You feel more love and you give more love. This is the only way and here’s how Colossians 3:12-14 instructs us about it:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

That’s our answer to the question how to have more love.

Now, let’s talk about how you can FEEL more LOVED.

In the last two weeks, we have talked about how our childhood experiences taught us how to give love (our love STYLE and we discussed 5 of them). That was on 02/24 and the podcast episode is called “How we love: 5 love styles and how we GIVE love” and hopefully by now you understand your own love style and WHY you GIVE love in that particular way…

And on 03/03 we talked about how our childhood experiences conditioned us to RECEIVE love a certain way. Tha podcast episode was called “5 love languages and how we RECEIVE love” and hopefully when you listened to it, you figured out why some things make you feel loved others don’t.

Very often, we do our BEST at loving someone but they still don’t FEEL loved by us. Do you agree? Have you ever tried and tried, was intentional and gave the love the best you could but it wasn’t good enough for that other person?

Why is that?

Often, our love STYLE doesn’t match that person’s love LANGUAGE.

What? Let me say it again. Often, our love STYLE doesn’t match that person’s love LANGUAGE. Meaning, they have expectations for what WE should DO for them to FEEL loved by us (because of how THEY grew up) but we don’t do those things (because of how WE grew up). Is that crazy? No, it’s actually just the usual everyday life. It’s the truth.

Many times during this series I told you that Michel did not love me. But as I was preparing for this final episode, after I did an episode on love styles and then love languages… I had this memory chasing me every day and I felt like I had to share with you.

I remember a late night, dark room, no light of any kind, Michel and I are in bed, literally sleeping, meaning each of us is asleep, we are not looking at each other, we are not talking, we can’t see each other.. and I hear in the dark: baby, you’re so beautiful…

I would wake up and think: how ingenuine, why would he do that? He couldn’t see me at all.

Was he talking TO me? Was this ABOUT me? Was he talking to someone else in his sleep?

And after the scene happened a few times, I was so hurt.

In the last two weeks, as I remembered that Michel’s love language is words of affirmation, I realized that I didn’t have to feel hurt, I could have chosen to accept the love the way he was giving it but it wasn’t anything that made me feel loved because words of affirmation is not MY love language.

Have you ever had anything like this happened to you?

Think now about a time someone was giving YOU love in the way THEY themselves receive love but it wasn't YOUR love language and so YOU did not feel LOVED.

Is it clicking now? It’s so profound, I have to share another example with you so it clicks.

On my YouTube channel YouTube.com/AnnaSzaboJDMBA I have people who watch and like my videos and I have 3 people who consistently dislike my videos. YouTube doesn’t evaluate my channel’s sentiment. Only engagement, meaning YouTube doesn’t care whether people like or DISlike my videos, YouTube only cares about whether or not people click on my videos and engage with them by clicking whichever button.

Remember that my love language is quality time? I shared it with you last week.

So, the fact that these 3 YouTube accounts were created, they have no other channel activity, they literally exist to troll my channel, and whenever I publish a video, which is every day, these trolls remember to go and engage with my video by clicking a dislike button - this makes me feel so loved. When I think about how much effort it takes, I feel like these trolls have a genuine intention to spend quality time with me every day.

Think about it: some people forget their friends’ birthdays and their own anniversaries but these 3 internet trolls remember that I publish a video every day and they go and engage with it by clicking that thumbs down button. Every time they do, YouTube gives my channel more visibility because it sees regular engagement from those people, so they help my channel grow.

And that makes me feel loved. Is it their intent? I don’t think so. But quality time is how I receive love, so they spend quality time with me through my content daily and I feel so loved.

So, how can we feel more LOVED? By understanding that everyone is different and unique, we all grew up differently and we give love differently. What that means is that whenever people give you love NOT in the way that MAKES you feel loved, it doesn’t mean that you are nOT loved, you don’t have to feel unloved, and you can choose to give grace and feel loved.

Hebrews 13:9 says

“for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace”

What does it mean? Become self-aware. Understand how you grew up and how it conditioned you to receive love. Understand your partner and his way of GIVING love to you. And there will be a gap, a mismatch, there usually is. And what fills that gap is grace.

Romans 5:2 refers to it as “this grace in which we stand”

We stand in grace received by us from God. He has expectations we don’t meet. We love Him but not entirely the way He asks us to love Him. And He matches the gap with His grace.

That’s what we can do, too. That’s how we can feel loved more often - by CHOOSING not to feel UNloved every time someone’s love STYLE doesn’t match our love language…

“for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace”

Let me pray for you.

Father God,

You are loving. You love us so much that you sent Jesus to die for us so we can have life and experience deep, unconditional love full of grace. Your love.

God, I lift up to you the woman listening. She deserves to HAVE more love in her life and to FEEL more loved.

I ask you to help her take this message and apply it in her relationships. I ask that you fill her heart with YOUR, God, love, so she can HAVE more love and GIVE more love.

I ask that the grace in which she stands she will use to close the gap between her love language (the way she receives love) and others’ love styles (the way they give her love). I ask that you close the difference, God. With grace abound.

Thank you, Father, for your love and for not just instructing but also EMPOWERING us to love one another unconditionally and graciously.

In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.