November 22
Love is an elusive commodity; ask any teenager who has fallen head-over-heels for the first time. There are two important things that must be recognized whether the individual ‘carrying the torch’ is a youngster who is new at being in love or a seasoned veteran in the ‘wonderful game of love’ as the old song by ‘the Platters’ identifies it.
Those two things are the facts that in order to be love, truly love, God must be at its root and also in order to be truly love, the emotion must be reciprocal. Of course, where God is concerned, we know He loves. That fact is stated again and again in scripture—and nowhere more clearly than in John 3:16, “God so loved the world, He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
In Psalm 31:23 God challenges His people to love Him back! Here He says, “Love the Lord, all His saints! He preserves the faithful but the proud He pays back in full.” In John 14:23 Jesus Himself says, “If anyone loves Me, he will obey My teaching and My Father will love him and we will come to him and abide with him.” The 'pay-back' to the proud is the great cost of living a life absent of the joy of loving and being loved, but the assurance of the presence of the Lord with the one who loves and obeys Him is indeed great reward.
The great stipulation to experiencing the flow of love between the One who is high and lifted up and ourselves is found in I John 4:20, 21 where the beloved Apostle says, “Anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: ‘Whoever loves God must also love his brother.’” How grateful we are that Jesus came to reveal God's heart to us by loving us with His perfect love and by giving us the joy of extending that precious commodity back to Him and to others.
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