Friday, November 19, 2010

REAL...

Resurrecting Love
I LOVE love.
I serve a God who IS Love.
So, I cannot fully serve Him without embracing love…

But in a world that distorts the meaning of real love, I sometimes find myself running from loving others.  Real love, the God kind of love, can be scary because it hurts…but it hurts in a way that means your heart is fully feeling.  It’s feeling what God feels! The past month this relationship between love and fear keeps resurfacing in my life.  Not only did I recently write for a friend’s website regarding this, but each time I open my Bible or sit to write, it’s as if God keeps revealing this dichotomy to me:  love’s opposite is fear, not hate 
                                                                                              Hate stems from fear… 
For example, the devil fears God and those following God, so he also hates them because he knows they can defeat him. He does not hate what he does not fear.  Before I continue, let me be clear that the fear I speak of here is not the healthy, respectful fear, but a fear which evokes emotionally and physically harmful reactions. 

I have noticed lately that the biggest deterrent to love is fear, and this fear masks in so many ways.  People are afraid of the other person, afraid of themselves, or just afraid of living and caring in general.  Sometimes I wonder, “If perfect love casts out all fear” (1 John 4:18), what are we, as a society, really operating in?  That thought in and of itself is scary to think about! 

We the Christians – who worship the God of Love who IS Love – half the time are so bound by fear and “what ifs” that we can’t cast our hearts out there.  If we truly understood, though, that our hearts belong to Jesus when we surrender out lives to Him, then we wouldn’t be afraid because we would trust where He leads our hearts and when He wants to open them up and use our hearts to reach someone else. 

It’s true, even in the care of Jesus, love and caring still HURTS at times!  Real love is sacrificial and our flesh doesn’t like to sacrifice.  If love must be patient, keep no record of wrongs, and if it always perseveres (1 Corinth. 13), we better believe that loving will lead to circumstances where it’s going to get hard and we’ll have to give up our personal comfort for the sake of serving another.  But, we cannot afford NOT loving because without it, the scriptures say we can’t possibly know God (1 John 4:7)!   .  How can we possibly love Him when we aren’t loving the “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40), for that’s how He says we serve Him on this earth?  When we run from the chance to love someone who might accept us in their moment of need, then discard our friendship, or when we run from the opportunity to embrace an unlovable or undesirable, then we run from God!

I say it again, if we are entrusting our hearts to God, we should not hesitate to LOVE.  Because, after all, it’s not our love, it’s HIS we’ll be giving.  And, if we are rejected or gossiped about because of it, they are persecuting and rejecting Him!  But, He never fails to love, and the best we can do is not fail to entrust ourselves to loving God and His creation with abandonment.
This agape love – the God-Love – is meant for everyone, and God extends it to everyone who accepts!  It is unconditional, unconventional, and unequivocal to anything else in this world!  To extend to people anything less than the love of our Savior, as imperfect of a vessel as we may be, is to reject God and what He wants to do in and through us. 

So, I ask again, why are we so afraid of love?  Sure, loving hurts.  Metaphorically speaking, sometimes it requires we nail our comfort to a cross and we spill our life out for another.  But, when we give a sacrifice of love for another, it always involves a resurrection of our hearts as we experience the glory of God working inside of us; at this point, the clothes of pain and sacrifice are discarded for the shining presence of the Holy Spirit within us.  For, by putting to death our selfish human instincts, we allow Him and His love to fill us up, and flow out of us in an ever-increasing measure.

We should not fear love when we understand it.  Love always leads LIFE!  It was Jesus’ LOVE that led to the cross, hence it was also His love that lead to His resurrection after that, a resurrection which gives us LIFE today!  True God-love, even when it’s trampled, rejected, despised and spat on by others, never leads to death in the end…but always resurrects real LIFE in our hearts because it releases Jesus to work inside and out! 

©Krinda Joy, Nov. 2010  
(Written with the hopes of resurrecting a church that chooses to love, not judge; one that
chooses to allow God to break their hearts for what breaks His, and embrace what/who He embraces).

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