Liefde
Gepost door Cris van Dusseldorp, een prachtig artikel over echte liefde!
I have been recently, much impacted by Greg Boyd, particulairly by his series on the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God that looks like Jesus, the domain where Jesus is King. The kingdom that is a kingdom of love.
During our holidays my wife and I where sharing and talking about the love of God. We came to the conclusion that love is the sum of who He is and in our desire to see more of the reality of the kingdom of God impact our church, city and nation we came to the following slogan; “Let Love Live In You, Let Love Live Through You.” Let us have a closer look at it.
Let Love Live In You
We can only give what we have got. It is from the inside out. That’s why it is so important that we are totally filled with the love of God. Love is ascribing worth to somebody else. God ascribed insurpassable worth to me, that when I was still a sinner Jezus Christ died for me. That’s amazing! God who is love, lives now on the inside of me.
We all have had things happen in our lives that makes this hard to truly believe. Maybe we can with our mind, but what about our heart, our emotions?
Learning to live in the concious awareness of Gods love for me every moment. With every breath, with every heartbeat and every brainwave concious of His love for me.
Jesus who is the very expression of who God is, was able to reflect that love because He came from the bosem of the Father (Joh. 1:18). From there, from that very centre of all things Jesus made Him known to us, because Jesus lived in love, was defined by love, was centered in love, was called to live and expressed the essence of love by giving His life for us.
What a wonderful example of incarnate selfsacrificial, non-judgemental love! However we can’t produce Gods love in our own strength.
The source of love the Bible says is: “… the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Rom. 5:5 NKJV).” It means that as a christian I don’t need to produce that love myself, it’s already there!. It is my task to stay open for Gods love allowing it to totally transform my life. Secondly it is my calling to reflect back that love to God, myself and others one by one. So let us take a look at the second part.
Let Love Live Through You
It means that we learn to ascribe worth to somebody else. It means to put into practice what Jesus said to esteem someone else higher that ourselves. It means that we learn to think as if we were the other person and try to view the world from their perspective. As christians we have the tendency to prove our own morality, by condeming the immorality of someone else. We place people in boxes of good and bad. However as long as we are condemning someone, we can’t love him. We start to begin to love someone when we start to recognise ourselves in them. But if we don’t like what we see because we haven’t learned to love ourselves and haven’t yet learned that God loves us inspite of that one particular area of our lives, we have a problem to allow love to live through us. That is what Jesus meant by taking the beam out of our own eyes so we can let love live through us. Love is the most single powerful force that changes lives. It starts with loving ourselves so that it can flow liberally through us, touching the one right now in front of us who will pass it on in turn. Is that the vision Jesus saw when He said; “I have come to send fire on the earth. And what will I do if it is already kindled?” (Luk 12:49). A fire that at that stage hadn’t started yet, because He hadn’t died yet at the cross. That selfsacrificial offer started a fire, the fire of love that establishes the kingdom on the earth.
So lets learn and grow in letting love live in us and letting love live through us.
