Life Principles for Living Out the Greatest Commandment预览

God is Love

Welcome, my friend. You are probably here for the same reasons I am. You want to become the person God envisions you to be, but you’re not quite there. Most days you and I are not anywhere close. You would love godliness to waft into you through your pillow by osmosis while you sleep at night, but it hasn’t happened yet. You’re still just the broken-down version of you, and I’m still the broken-down version of me.

Neither of us has likely greeted a day loving God with everything we are, but today you and I have decided to learn. We want to love Him completely. So we begin this journey together, to learn how to live out the Greatest Commandment. Before we get started, there is something you need to know.

The King has been waiting for you. You are His treasured possession. He has chosen you. Before you move a muscle, you need to know he totally digs you. He loves you before you can love Him back, every time.

Over the next ten days, the King asks that you show up right here. Wherever “here” is for you, the King will be there to meet with you. Learning to live out the Greatest Commandment sounds like a lot of work on our part. Actually, it is about a love completely driven from the relationship initiator, for we can only love Him because He started it. He loved us first.

The apostle John tells us that not only does the God of the universe love us before we love Him, love is who He is. Love is not simply a quality of God’s character. John could have described God as loving, just as he claims himself to be compassionate and slow to anger (Exodus 34:6). He could have noted that God loves as an optional choice. The difference is more than semantics. Love is not what God does. Love is His very nature. It is His essence. Where He can act compassionately or choose to be merciful, God, who is love, takes care not to separate love from what He says or how He acts. Perhaps this reality of who God is explains why love is what He most desires from us.

Is this perhaps why He asks us to love Him with everything we are—because love is everything He is?

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