“Love - Bestowed, Directed, Kept"

"Love - Bestowed, Directed, Kept"

     

     First, God bestows His love within us when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.  "The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5).

     Then, we ask for guidance into the living experience of such goodness.  "And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God" (II Thessalonians 3:5).

    Finally, we engage ourselves by the Lord's leadership to maintain our hearts in the atmosphere and environment of His love.  "Keep yourselves in the love of God" (Jude 1:21).

    

    We require all three aspects of grace if we are to know the love of God in genuine experience and expression.  Without the Holy Spirit's presence in our hearts, we could never know the love of God, nor could we continue in His love.  Thus, we acknowledge that through Christ, we have received the very essence of our Lord's character and nature as His gift to our redeemed spirits.  This leads to prayer that we will realize the opportunities God gives us to respond to His love as revealed in our life and sphere of influence.  We then "keep ourselves in the love of God",  seeking to consistently exercise our faculties by loving Him and others as the Holy Spirit leads and enables.  "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us" (I John 4:11-12).  

    Let us rejoice that the love of God now resides in us.  Let us prayerfully seek the knowing of such grace for others and for ourselves along the pathways of our lives.  And let us do those things that maintain our hearts in the environment and atmosphere, as it were, of the love of God.  Thereby we experience the glory of being "partakers of the Divine nature", and then the Christ-enabled practitioners thereof (II Peter 1:4).  This is life.  This is truth.  This is love.  There is no other.

"I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them."

(John 17:26).

"This I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment."

(Philippians 1:9)

"And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men."

(I Thessalonians 3:12)

Weekly Memory Verse

     Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering, for He is faithful that promised.

(Hebrews 10:23)