Can Do part 4
Its about appetite. What you're hungry and thirsty for. Because, in a very real way, you are what you eat. If you eat junk food all day, you're not going to feel (or look) very good. If you eat Spiritual junk food all day, or worse yet, if you feed on what the world is screaming at you instead of the still, small voice of the Lord, you won't be very Spiritually, or mentally, healthy. Let me say it another way: If you don't know that you're loved you WILL look for love in all the wrong places. Because that is our appetite. That is the desire of our heart. What else could the heart desire but love? And I can remember--it had to be a couple of years ago now--preaching a sermon series about grace. And the whole time I was kind of leading up to the revelation that "grace changes your appetite." Except, when I got ready to get that sermon ready, God dropped this truth on me: Grace doesn't CHANGE your appetite. Grace SATISFIES your appetite! Because, really, we don't WANT to do all of those things we end up doing when we're trying to fill that God-shaped, love-shaped void inside of us. Remember Paul writing about a man under the law who does what he hates but can't do what he wants? That's bondage. The bondage of sin. Because when you don't believe that you are loved (sin is unbelief) you'll do anything to try to get that love. Anything. You'll sell your soul for it, if I can say it that way. You'll work and work and work to try to get that carrot, even the stick always moves, keeping it just out of your reach. You're caught in a trap. You need someone to come and save you. That's what happened on the cross. That's how Jesus took away the sin of the world. He gave us something (someONE, Himself, LOVE) to believe in. How else could you defeat the lie except with the truth? How else could you take away unbelief except with faith? And now that we know that we are loved... we can love. We can stop looking for it, and we can start experiencing it by giving it away. That's what love is; love is giving. Giving everything you have and everything you are. Laying your life down for your friends. That's what we can do through Christ. Because that's what Christ did for us. And as us. And that's what Christ continues to do in us, and through us, and as us. We live in Him because He lives in us. We can do all things through Him because He is doing all things through us. No longer do we have to do those things that we never really wanted to do in the first place. No longer do we have to try to earn something that can't be earned. The wages of sin (unbelief) is death. But the gift of God is the abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life of Jesus. A life of love. Love is what makes the abundant life abundant. Love is what makes life worth living. Love is what makes it POSSIBLE to truly live. In other words, its all about love. When the Bible says, "God is love" in 1 John 4:8 the word "love" means "love feast." That's the table that Jesus prepared in the presence of our enemies. That's the six-course meal that He wants to share with us as He stands at the door and knocks. That's what we can do. We can eat of the Tree of Life. We can feast on His love. We can let God love us, and we can love Him back by loving each other. We ARE loved... so we CAN love. That's what we can do!