When I think of love I think of sacrifice. God is love, and everything He does is out of love. He sacrificed as evidence of His love for me.
God set the example for love. God is giving, patient, merciful, and gracious. All of those traits mean that you have to be selfless in some way to display them. You are thinking of your self less when you are doing those things.
Love is sacrifice. I have to sacrifice how I feel or what I want out of love. I can’t hate you and love God, because I’m not making a sacrifice of my feelings. If I loved God, then out of love for Him, I’d love you.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I should be a pushover, but it does mean that I must be willing to sacrifice for the sake of love. I don’t know about you, but I’ll admit, that is the hard part.
We love each other because he loved us first. If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? – 1 John 4:19-20