LOVED OF THE LORD Pt.2

(I Love hearing from you, thanks for your comments)

JESUS LOVES ME THIS I KNOW

That I love the Lord is no surprise, nothing amazing, no great feat… how can I but love him in light of who He is and what He has done.

The amazing, mind blowing, difficult to fully grasp part is that He loves me. In spite of my sin and my fickleness and my faithlessness and failing He truly loves me. Now that is a great mystery.

Pause for a minute and think about that today. What is there about me that a perfect God would find lovable. I bring nothing into the relationship with God… least-wise not anything good. It’s all Him.

IT IS GOD'S LOVE

His love is unique, it is divine, it is the unconditional AGAPE love of God. It is unlike anything we can imagine or originate in our human-ness. It is neither the love you have for your spouse, nor the love you have for your children (or grandchildren) as intense as that love may be. God’s love is wholly, and holy, different.

It is God’s love.

IT IS THE SPIRITS' FRUIT

Yet by His Spirit we have been given the capacity to love like God does:

• ...but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh and patience; patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. Romans 5.3-5

The Love of God is the fruit of the Spirit according to Galatians 5.22.

Here again is something to ponder; fruit is naturally produced by a healthy plant. It is not something to strive for or worked for it comes naturally in a well rooted, well watered, well weeded, regularly pruned plant. The idea of a strawberry plant straining to make a strawberry… working really hard at it, makes for a ridiculous mental picture. So does our trying to manufacture AGAPE love.

The love we are talking about is not the emotional, Hallmark card, smaltzy affection we so often think of. This love is sacrificial, active, and involved; and it is described in I Corinthians 13.

• Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

But even this passage has been “Hallmark-ed” and when we do so we rob the passage of it’s power.

IT IS POWER

"The Power of Love" is not just an old Huey Lewis song... it's true!

Just prior to the definition given in Vss 4-8 Paul tells us something that is radical check it out:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Without love, the most eloquent words are transformed into annoying clatter. Love is the power of speech, of teaching.

If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

One might have the greatest gifts in the world but they evaporate, become nothing without love.

And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

All service, all ministry, all giving; if done without love profits me nothing, it is with the wrong motive. I might as well stay home.

I will leave you with these things to ponder along with me.

Such power! Love is a force.

Oh Lord, fill us with THAT today!