Dear Family
I was deeply moved by the video presentation we watched recently which was shown by our visitors from the Gideons. The story line: a lady on a pathway to hell, reads a Gideons bible in her hotel room, gives her life to Jesus, goes to perform at her sched-uled nightclub, finds herself “loving eve-ryone in the room”, tells everyone there what Jesus has done for them, gets fired, goes to a friend, ends up with her entire family now serving God. Really WOW stuff!
What struck me was the fact that she battled to understand at the time after giving her life to Jesus, that she “loved everyone”. Isn’t this just so true? It is very difficult for us not to “love everyone”. It may be that we are angry with someone for a time, but it doesn’t last too long and for-giveness flows as love pours out. Jesus did say it would be like this in John 13:35 “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, said: “…God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:5). You see, it’s just not possible not to love IF we are true followers of Jesus Christ. This is kind of a catch 22 situation. It al-most seems “unfair”. When someone is really different from us, when we are treated unjustly, when we desperately want to go in for the kill, WHOOSH, an-other wave of love goes surging through us and spoils our opportunity to really get the knives in. Our flesh cries out to get revenge and our spirit, controlled by the Holy Spirit, spoils it all with this love stuff.
John (1 John 3:14) actually links our ability to love to our salvation, and says quite categorically that “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.” Yes, I know, some-times it does seem highly impos-sible to love some people, but when this happens, I always remind myself that God has been there and done that en-tirely successfully. Romans 5:8 tells us, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He died for me, the unlovable, sinful, selfish one, long before He cleaned me up. Therefore it frees me to allow Him to do the same to others through me.
Whoop! Whoop!
Paul