Have you ever tried to grasp the love of God? It's so much more than our minds can comprehend. How can He know all about us and love us anyway? How can How can He love the molester as much as the molested? God's love is inconceivable to the human mind. This love is so much more than the feelings we commonly categorize as love. You know those feelings that come and go based on the performance of others? God's love is way more than a feeling; the power that God does everything from! Love is how God heals, delivers and sets free. Love is how God raised Jesus from the dead and how He released us from the bondage of sin, fear and death. If that wasn't enough, He then gives us this same power known as love. It means we can love just like God. We get excited when we hear we can love like God and we set out to try to love that way only to come up short when people don't do what we think they should or change as fast we we expect. The love of God isn't a feeling, it's His very essence. We can't love like God in our own strength (as I'm sure you've found out) so what should we do? We love like God as the result of being loved by God. When we abide in His presence and personally experience His love we are equipped to love to others.
I'm convinced that whenever we have areas in our lives where we aren't making progress, we need to go deeper in love. God is inviting us into a journey deeper into the love of God. We can learn to live like Jesus. Jesus never faced a problem that love couldn't conquer whether it was feeding 5000 with a little boys' lunch or raising Lazarus from the dead. He didn't even respond to his enemies with brute force or indifference, but with love! Jesus was deeply connected to God's love. He understand that He could do nothing of value apart from love. Love was never hard for Jesus. He wasn't trying to love. He loved others out of the relationship He had with God. Not only did Jesus love, He always had the victory because He refused to live outside of love. As believers we can link up with God and experience the same victory. There are only two worlds we can live in: a world of love or a world of fear. When we modify who God has created us to be to avoid being hurt, we are responding in fear. When we refuse to love because others don't we are responding in fear. There is no victory in fear! Don't spend time trying to love. Spend your time learning of God's great love for you. As we grow in knowledge of God's love fro us, it changes how we love God, ourselves and others. It frees us from the need to self protect and enables us to walk in the power of love. It's this place of love that we can experience the life God has for us. It's a life that free from fear. It's a life where we live our dreams and doing do honors God.
Here are a few of my favorite scriptures on love: Ephesians 1-3 (all three chapters, read them in various translations), John 14 and 1 John 4. I'm praying what Paul prayed for the church of Ephesus (see Chapter 3)
Dear God, Help us to know your love through experience. Help us to be may we be rooted deeply in your love increasing in our understanding of the depth, width, breadth and height of your love. Help us to let go of all fear that keeps us from loving fully and walk in the power of love that produces victory in every area of our lives. In Jesus' name, Amen
