How Love Changes Everything

Jesus set a high bar for those who would follow Him. We are hard pressed to love in lesser ways, let alone the way Jesus did. We are by nature self centered, seekers of our own glory.

So how do we follow this command, which is less about what we are to do and more about who we are to become? We keep it before us, as a continual target for the heart more so than a box that can be checked off. And we ask for His grace, and to know His love more, which will allow us to love as He loved not because we think it is the right thing to do, but because it has become the very thing we want to do. We will share His love more fully when receiving His love becomes our continual practice. In the absence of this we will only feel empty as we give love away. The gifts of conviction, repentance and forgiveness allow us to experience the depths of His love. The gifts of longing and suffering allow us to experience the comfort of His love. Indeed, situations which at first might tempt us to draw back from Him, in the end can reveal His love to us more fully.

To love as Jesus loved will feel like sacrifice for us, it was for Him. The laying down of ourselves for the sake of another will always be contrary to the flesh we carry this side of Heaven. But as His Spirit continues to fill us with His love, we will find it too vast to squander. As we let go of the self to which we so tightly cling, we are free to not only accept His love, but to give it away. May His grace allow us to more fully experience and more fully give of His love today.

And through this may we become...More Content

I once thought contentment was learning to be okay with less. Less than what my heart longs for. Less than what I want. Less than what I feel I need.

These ten words, from the upper room where Jesus washed the feet of His disciples, make me wonder if perhaps it is more than.

“having loved his own He loved them to the end.” John 13:1

Jesus knew they would all leave him. He knew one of them would betray Him. But rather than drawing back from the pain his love for them would cost, Jesus pressed toward them. He bent down and washed their feet. He loved them to the end.

His love was not limited to these twelve. The love with which he loved them, is the same love He loves us with. He loves us to the end (which for us in a sense is actually the beginning).

The more I begin to understand His love the more contentment seeps into my being. He who could not love me more, will not love me less. Contentment is the knowledge of His love coupled with His Sovereignty. Grace is the middle of the sandwich, holding these truths together and enabling me to be okay with this moment He has allowed. Moments I feel His goodness because life is good. Moments when life is not good, and I need His grace because without it I cannot so much as take another breath.

Knowing His love does exempt us from pain, it offers hope for enduring it.

Knowing His love does not exempt us from the experience of unfulfilled longings, rather it reminds us that fulfillment will come when we fully enter His presence.

Knowing His love does not exempt us from hardship, it allows us to walk it with the knowledge that our every burden is a shared one. Maybe we are not content with less because we are too content with our lack of more.

More of His love. More of the glory He calls us to behold and share.

There is always more of the Godhead for us to know, to be awed by, to be filled up with. May our discontent reorient us to what we are made to yearn for. And may we find more.

Wouldn't it be great to be Bent on Contentment like this?

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