“As the Father loved me, I too have loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. This is my commandment: love each other just as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to give up one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I don’t call you servants any longer, because servants don’t know what their master is doing. Instead, I call you friends, because everything I heard from my Father I have made known to you. You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you could go and produce fruit and so that your fruit could last. As a result, whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. I give you these commandments so that you can love each other. ~John 15:9-17 (CEB)
“Now Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person. He does not allow us to continue thinking of our Father who fills and overflows space as a morose and miserable monarch, a frustrated and petty parent, or a policeman on the prowl.
One cannot think of God in such ways while confronting Jesus’ declaration, ‘He that has seen me has seen the Father.’ One of the most outstanding features of Jesus’ personality was precisely an abundance of joy. This he left as an inheritance to his students, ‘that their joy might be full’ (John 15:11). And they did not say, ‘Pass the aspirin,’ for he was well known to those as a happy man. It is deeply illuminating of kingdom as a happy man. It is deeply illuminating of kingdom living to understand that his steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.
So we must understand that God does not ‘love’ us without liking us- through gritted teeth- as ‘Christian’ love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core- which we vainly try to capture without tired but indispensable old word love.” ~From The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
Help me this day O Lord to love with Your love. May it be genuine. May it be ever true. May the people I meet get a glimpse of Your love through me. Amen.
Pieces of the Puzzle 