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Christian Network

Before becoming a Christian I thought love was a warm emotion I felt for someone or something. Not so the love of God. This love is not just some manageable, pleasant feeling that we can in some way control. It is all-powerful and all consuming. This love demands everything of us. Too often we try to keep it at bay. What we need is to be both lost and ultimately found in it. It is not, should not, and cannot be under our rule. This may seem obvious to most but I’ll state it again: divine love does not exist to be controlled by men. Such love is for us, it is ours in the sense of our ability to receive it, but it is something beyond our ability to manipulate or contain.

Any believer who has not at some time felt the profound gravity of the love of Christ has not yet gone far in the journey of faith. To know His love is to be in some sense undone by it. Most "mountain-top" experiences are, at root, experiences of coming into visceral contact with the love of God in a way we never have before. The reason many of us go into the "valley" shortly afterwards is because after having known the ecstasy of being loved that way the often loveless, fallen world we live in seems that much worse by comparison. We are also undone because the presence of God received in such a pure and powerful form reveals the depth of our own loveless-ness. Being loved by our Lord never leaves us unchanged. Each revelation of His feelings for us plays a part in the ongoing melting of the persisting fear manifested in the hardness of our hearts.

"Perfect love casts out fear." This love is not only manifested in power but in perfection. The love of God is perfect, as He is, and so it perfects us.

In addition to power and perfection we can use another word to describe such a love and that word is passionate. It is appropriate to describe the last hours of Christ’s life as his passion because it was his love that was the candle that burned so brightly even as the candle of His physical life flickered and went out. Only a infinitely fierce love could have taken the Son of God to that hill outside Jerusalem. Calvary is mute testimony to how passionately we are desired. This was no lukewarm affection that the Creator of the universe held and holds for us. Never could any human being be more loved than in the passion that compelled Jesus to face the cross. This is how much we mean to Him.

As we read our Bibles, pray our prayers and sing our worship songs do we live enough in the recognized, received love of God? If not what keeps us from knowing our beloved-ness? It is true that all human beings know Him "as through a glass darkly." These questions are not posed without the knowledge that we are not yet in Heaven. We cannot receive God’s love today, as we will then. But all too many of us are not basking in the love He does desire for us to experience even now. Why? Perhaps it is because we want it to not be too intrusive. We are afraid of what it will do to the safe little worlds we have constructed in ourselves for our own protection. We are right to have this fear. God does want to destroy any false sense of security we might hold on to at the expense of knowing what it is to be wholly His. He is truly the lover of our souls and He knows that to receive more of His love we must be willing to lose everything we have built that stands between Him and us. Thank God that in the power, perfection and passion of His love for us we can submit ourselves to such a loss. Thank God that, in the end, this will be no loss because we will have gained Him as He has gained us. That is all that matters.