ME-ssentials – Loving, Like God – Day Fifteen
ESSENTIALS for Me to Be: Loving, Like God
September 15th, 2021
What’s your ESSENTIAL?
Essential: absolutely necessary; indispensable; the essence of a thing; inherent and intrinsic, vital
1 Corinthians 13:4-10, ‘Love is large and incredibly patient. Love is gentle and consistently kind to all. It refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else. Love does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance. Love does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek its own honor. Love is not easily irritated or quick to take offense. Love joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong. Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others. Love never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up. Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which one day fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten. Our present knowledge and our prophecies are but partial, but when love’s perfection arrives, the partial fades away.’ (TPT)
There are not too many grander pastures to abide in than one that is infused by love, nor deeper waters to be immersed in than one that is overflowing with love, nor more potent desires in the human heart than to love and be loved in return. But love can also be a falsified contract, a trip gone astray, a hope deferred, a tangle of emotions and a web of deceit. It is true; love is a many splendored thing. It comes in the form of puppies and carries lashes and lessons, and we can be enslaved to it and lost without it, willing to die for it and unwilling to live for it, and many often swear they will die from it. Love, like the world understands, is highly over-rated, and so often misunderstood and misrepresented. Love, can break you, can make you, and we often do some pretty crazy things because of it.
But nobody did anything nearly as preposterous as God did, when, because of His great love for us, mankind—who had thrown all His promises back in His face and stomped on His heart and mutilated His love for us to where it didn’t even resemble what He intended—received the ultimate: His love for us. ‘But God put His love on the line for us by offering His Son in sacrificial death while we were absolutely of no use whatsoever to Him (Romans 5:8, MSG).’ This is a love like no other, the most perfect form of love that can ever exist, and impossible for humanity to legitimately offer, recreate, fathom, communicate, apart from God. It is a love that one does outside of themselves, without one fraction of themselves in mind, and without one thought toward consequences or repercussions to oneself. We wouldn’t do anything for another if it cost us more to love than what we might receive. But with God in mind, we are able to conceive in a small way, loving like He first loved us, loving like we loved enough to die for.
