For today's post I want to again look at "My Utmost For His Highest" by Oswald Chambers:
You Won’t Reach It On
Tiptoe
Add…to
your brotherliness…love. — 2 Peter 1:5,
7 (see moffatt )
Love is indefinite to most
of us, we do not know what we mean when we talk about love. Love is the
sovereign preference of one person for another, and spiritually Jesus demands
that that preference be for Himself (cf. Luke 14:26). When the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ is easily first; then we
must practise the working out of these things mentioned by Peter.
The first thing God does is to knock pretence and the pious pose
right out of me. The Holy Spirit reveals that God loved me not because I was
lovable, but because it was His nature to do so. “Now,” He says to me, “show
the same love to others” — “Love as I have loved you.” “I will bring any number of people
about you whom you cannot respect, and you must exhibit My love to them as I
have exhibited it to you.” You won’t reach it on tiptoe. Some of us have tried to, but we were
soon tired.
The Lord “suffereth long….” Let me look within and see His dealings with
me. The knowledge that God has loved me to the uttermost, to the end of all my
sin and meanness* and selfishness and wrong, will send me forth into the world
to love in the same way. God’s love to me is inexhaustible, and I must love
others from the bedrock of God’s love to me. Growth in grace stops the moment I
get huffed. I get huffed because I have a peculiar person to live with. Just
think how disagreeable I have been to God! Am I prepared to be so identified
with the Lord Jesus that His life and His sweetness are being poured out all
the time? Neither natural love nor Divine love will remain unless it is
cultivated. Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained by discipline.
*mean: as used here, something or someone ordinary, common, low,
or ignoble, rather than cruel or spiteful.
Whether or not we choose to walk in love in this life will not change our relationship with the One, True God, but it WILL affect our life here on earth! We are free to choose, but we SHOULD choose LOVE in obedience to the Word of God! What we choose WILL determine how much of our New Covenant inheritance we will be able to access in this life! Choose LOVE and LIFE! AMEN! Here is Hillsong Young and Free with "Real Love":
Shalom in Him!
