11/08/2020
We say that we love God, and Jesus Christ, but do we truly know what that love should be? We say that God’s love for us is boundless, but can we begin to understand what it means to do anything without limits? O my friends, we say we know these things but until we come face to face with God, and feel the wounds of Christ with our own hands, we are blind, and the mystery will not have been revealed to us.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV
When we are children we watch as our parents sacrifice for us; we go to sleep at night with the loving hand of our mother rocking us, and the voice of our father praying for us when we are ill, or in need. We know these things, and say that this is a parent’s love for us, but until we have children of our own we can never really understand what love was in a mother’s heart as she rocked us, or the fear that love brought to a father as he prayed for us. No, we can only know what we have been able to experience, and the love that we have felt in our own hearts.
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
1 John 3:1-2 ESV
As wonderful as love is to us now it is nothing when compared with what awaits us when the scales fall from our eyes, and our hearts are fully circumcised. We love God and say to Him that no love could be any greater than ours; we love our spouse and say that surely this is an endless love, and then we have children, and ask God “Father, how can I love anything with greater intensity than this?” Yet as great as we perceive these lives to be now, they are but tiny candles in the night when compared to the love that God is prepared to show us.
“Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.”
1 Corinthians 13:8-10 ESV
Are we ready to know perfect love? Is our heart capable of containing the fullness of the love that God has prepared to pour into it? O the surprise that awaits us, and the wonder that surrounds the mystery of our Father’s love.
Prayer:
Father, thank you for the love I have in my heart for you, and thank you for the glimpse I have been given into your love for me. I long for the day when I can experience love for you fully, and know what it means to love you with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I yearn for the instant when I can look at Jesus, and know the love that it took a Father to send Him to suffer and die for me, and the love that this brother had for me when He asked from Calvary for our forgiveness. Holy, Holy, Holy, are you our God whose love exceeds all that we know, and in whom the love for mankind is but a potion that you feel. Praised be your name for the love you show us each and every day, and hear our psalms, and words of worship as we attempt to convey our love for you; thinking it to be the entirety of our love... but remaining lost to what it’s fullness truly is. Wash us clean of sin with the price of love paid by you, and Jesus for us. In the moment of our judgement, let us not doubt that you will find us worthy of eternity with you because your unfathomable love has paid our price, and your Son’s life the toll for our redemption.
Rich Forbes