Saturday 22 June 2013

June 21

“…as Christ also hath loved us…” Ephesians 5:2

The Holy Ghost through the Apostle Paul here instructs us to walk in love, in the same manner that Christ loved us. The high calling of the believers in Christ includes the privilege, honour and responsibility to demonstrate to one another and beyond reasonable doubt, the kind and quality of love that they have learned and experienced from Jesus. The love of Christ is open, manifest, constant, selfless and available to all. When such qualities are evident in ‘our’ love, we are approximating the example of Jesus and delivering a true message from heaven to those around us. It is noteworthy that we do not actually have anything like true love of our own, that is, in our natural fallen nature. Any love which is morally appropriate, godly and scripturally correct, is therefore a reflection of what God has imparted to us, and of what we allow Him to work through us. The best exercise we can enter into when considering love, is to look to Jesus and observe closely His pattern of love. The purity, altruism, gentleness and firmness of His matchless, unparalleled love, strikes our hearts with a sense of reality and causes us to long to be more like Him! We cannot imitate His Omnipotence, or His Omniscience and are limited in our physical ability to be in more than one place at once - but we can all learn to love more like Jesus does and follow the example He gave us! This is doubtless one of the ways by which we can most readily emulate the Lord, His manner and life. It is within the reach of every believer, and every day brings to us ample opportunities to practice His love. He told us this was His new commandment, the one by which others would identify us as His true disciples, that we would love one another by the standard and quality of His love! Even our love for God is quantified and qualified by the love we hold for each other! I think we can all readily admit that we are thoroughly challenged by the benchmark He has set for us, and that we all, even when we have been at this for a while, and may have made some progress, have yet a long way to go!  


http://www.pentecostalfamilychurch.com.au/devotion

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