Love Has A Name: Learning to Love the Different, the Difficult & Everyone Else by Adam Weber.
What’s It About?
In Love Has A Name, Adam Weber shares the stories of *twenty-seven different people God used to open his heart to love more fully. Adam shares personal, real-life experiences with people who’ve crossed his path. From those stories, he shares the lessons God has taught him through those encounters about how to be loved and how to love others like Jesus. True to the heart of the book, each chapter is named for the person whose story is being told and who inspired the lesson in love.
As you walk with Adam through these stories, you’ll learn to love the unpopular, to reach out to the different, to comfort people through their pain, to speak truth to people even when it’s hard to hear, and so much more. You’ll even learn what it means to be on the receiving end of these different expressions of love and how to have confidence in Jesus’ love for yourself.
The way Adam shares these experiences is so vulnerable, moving and engaging you can’t help but be drawn into the story, connected to the people, and inspired to love more like Jesus.
*Watch this video of the book launch party to hear Adam interview people from the book.
How It Impacted Me
It didn’t take long for God to start speaking to me through Love Has A Name. Just a few pages in, Adam reminds us of the words of Jesus that the world would know our love for Him by the way we love others. (John 13:34-35) “Not by our church attendance. Not by how many Bible verses we have memorized. Not by all the good religious things we do. Not even by our theology,” Adam writes.
Adam emphasizes that all of those things are biblical, right and important for Jesus followers and I wholeheartedly agree. But as I read those words and the words of 1 John 4:20, which he goes on to quote, a thought came to mind that really struck my heart. If you and I do all the right external spiritual things but don’t treat others with love, it doesn’t help people know our God is real and it doesn’t compel them to want to know our Savior.
I don’t know about you, but I need to be reminded of that constantly. As I began the book, it was a much-needed heart check as to why this conversation about loving well is so vital for me and for my fellow Christians.
As a Jesus follower, how I treat people is a key expression of how I honor God and live out my faith in Him. It matters to God’s heart how I love others because He made them in His image, because He loves them, and because my actions can either help people encounter God and experience His heart for them or hinder that process. I want to be a Christian who loves Jesus and loves others well.
Favorite Quote
“What if one of the best steps to loving the rough-around-the-edges people in our lives starts with knowing their stories? Getting to know them—their names and their past hurts, dreams, passions—so that we can begin to love them?”
– Adam Weber, Love Has A Name
Why You Should Read It
It’s such a divisive time in our culture right now and even for Christians we can let that impact our relationships, our attitudes, our mindsets, how we speak to and treat people. If we look at our interactions with others who share our faith and who don’t, both in our personal lives and online, I think we’ll quickly see that we as Christians have a lot of growing to do in loving others well.
Love Has A Name is a gracious yet convicting invitation to realign our hearts with Jesus’ command to us: to be people who love Him and, because of that, love our neighbors as well. The message of this book is so timely. The humility with which Adam encourages and challenges us in the book makes it feel like you’re going on a journey with a brother in Christ as you both learn love people better–and that’s exactly what it is.
About The Author
Adam Weber is the founder and lead pastor of Embrace Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the author of Talking with God, and host of The Conversation podcast. He is husband to Becky and father to Hudson, Wilson, Grayson and Anderson.
Adam is one the most sincere and refreshing voices I follow online. I’m consistently encouraged in my faith and provoked to love Jesus more by everything he shares. I encourage you to get to know him and his content more!
Connect with Adam: Website | Podcast | Embrace Church | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Get your copy of Love Has A Name here
Let’s Talk: Have you read Love Has A Name? What impacted you most from the book? Discuss this post in the comments below.
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