How do we love?…
‘My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.’
It’s one thing to say we love God but quite another to walk it out. God doesn’t just want our words, He wants and deserves everything from His children because He gave everything for us.
Do you long to live here friend….
‘And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with ALL thy heart, and with ALL thy soul, and with ALL thy mind, and with ally thy strength:’
Do you long to return to the days when Jesus was everything to you, before the world crept back in and stole your joy? Do you long to love God with all you are?
So, how do we even begin to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength? How do we love God in the things we do, how does God’s love become, in essence, who we are?
There are two verses that come to mind, firstly this that Jesus spoke to His disciples not long before He was crucified…
‘Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.’
Are we abiding in Christ?
Each true child of God has that positional abiding, they are safe IN Christ…
‘My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.’
BUT are we abiding experientially? Are we living as though we are in Christ and Christ in us? Are we constantly drawing the nutrients we need to bear spiritual fruit from the true vine, from Jesus Christ, from His word, from the living Word?
Friends, I lived for several years in that dry, lukewarm place of not living in my abiding. I allowed the busyness of marriage and new motherhood and the distractions of the world to steal the joy I had in Christ and my reading of God’s word became a task to tick off my to do list and not that essential feeding from the vine.
Friend, it was a long hard road back. My heart aches for any of you that feel to be there today. If you are there, I would encourage you to earnestly seek that God would change your desires so that your one desire is to live for God and His glory, that He would help you to once more to truly live in your abiding.
Jesus went on to say to His disciples…
‘As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.’ Ah, how we need grace to be given that we might continue in God’s love but how? Jesus tells us in the next verse…
‘If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.’
It’s by keeping God’s commandments, by living for God and not for self.
It’s by living in this…
‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’
‘YET NOT I’
Friends, it’s when we let go of self and let Christ live IN and THROUGH us that we begin to truly love God and abide in His love.
It’s as we surrender our all to Him, as we give each day to Him, as we seek for God’s desires to be our desires that the love of Christ begins to become who we are.
It’s when we no longer TRY but RELY.
It’s when we don’t try to do what’s right, when we don’t try to love as Jesus loved in our OWN strength but rely on God to fill us so full of love to Him and His love to us that it overflows into everything we are and do.
It’s when our one desire is “No more ME, just all Christ IN me.”
This is where we begin to love… ‘in deed and in truth.’ and where we not only abide positionally but also experientially.
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1 John 3:18, Mark 12:30, John 15:4, John 10:28, John 15:9,10, Gal 2:20,
Encouraging Women to Seek and Abide... 