Shalom,
Today I want to share this from "My Utmost For His Highest" devotional by Oswald Chambers:
You Won’t Reach It On Tiptoe
Add…to your brotherliness…love.
— 2 Peter 1:5, 7
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 Spirit, 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
AMEN! Here is Brandon Lake with "Nothing New":
Shalom in Him!