All About Love

"...and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." I Corinthians 13:2b

How well you and I learn to truly love God and love others will really be the measure of our fruitfulness in the kingdom of God. There is one standard in His kingdom. Love. Sincere and genuine love, not masked in any way. This kind of love alone will change the world. Jesus changed the course of history by demonstrating love in a way that would forever become the example of how we are to live.
Jesus taught his disciples a lot of things, but most importantly He taught them about love and compassion for the sick, hurting, broken, and the outcast. Jesus always looked through a different lens. He was not concerned with the outward distractions that the pharisees were loaded down with. Jesus was able to say before the crowd of witnesses ready to cast stones at the woman caught in adultery, "Let him who is without sin throw the first stone." God kind of love is really different from the world kind of love, which is mostly lust and based on how one feels moment to moment.

"Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13

There is no greater love than that of truly laying your life down for one another. This refers to the kind of humility that considers others better than oneself. This refers to putting someone else's needs before mine, and helping them fulfill the desires of their heart. When we spend ourselves on loving others it will be difficult, and sometimes most inconvenient.
Love is not efficient. Love will need to happen at the wrong times, the times when you feel most like...not loving. Love will always give you the opportunity to lay down your life. Love does not take advantage of, or manipulate. Love will hold no strings attached. Love will know no limits.

"Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth." 1 John 3:18

Psalm 27:4

One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.

If there was one verse that I would hold on to it would be Psalm 27:4. If there was one thing that I could say defined me it would be this reality found in this verse. I believe that there is a real place where we can dwell with The Lord in His house and find ourselves head over heels in love with the Creator all the days of our lives. There are so many distractions in this life. There is one reality that supersedes all the lesser realities. I am a lover of God, and He is a lover of my soul. I belong to Him, and He belongs to me. To gaze upon this beautiful God is all that I really desire. For when I gaze, I become fixated with the only perfect, holy, true, loving, and full of light being in the whole world and cosmos.

King David was on to something. There is a reason he gave himself to seeking The Lord and gazing on His beauty. All those who take the time to become gazers of the most amazing Creator will be transformed from this lowly world to a higher reality that is fit for eternity. We are created for more than this world. This world will leave us hanging dry. We must choose to behold the beauty of The Lord all the days of our lives. We must fixate ourselves upon the eternal glory that awaits all those who love their God with all they are, more than pleasure, and more than this world. Oh to be transformed, oh to be overwhelmed with this God! He is worth giving everything you have and everything you are.