Giving part 4
Love is giving. That's my definition. "I will gladly spend myself and all I have for you, even though it seems that the more I love you, the less you love me" (2 Corinthians 12:15 NLT). Giving everything you have and everything you are. That's what God the Father did when He gave His only begotten Son. He gave us everything. He wanted the best for us, so He gave the best TO us. He wanted us to stop perishing and to have everlasting life. So He gave us the one and only thing that could bring us out of death and into life! Look at 1 John 3:14, "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death." The difference between death and life is, in a Word, love. No love, no life. Know love, know life! Because love is giving. And you can't give what you don't have. You can only give what you do have. So in order to give everything you have and everything you are... you have to know what you have and you have to know who you are. And the way we know what we have and who we are... is by knowing Jesus. He is our true identity: God in the flesh, love in a body. God in OUR flesh. Love in OUR body. Colossians 3:10 tells us that we, "...have put on the new man, which is renewed in the knowledge after the image of him that created him." It is the knowledge of who God is in us that equips and empowers us to know who we are in Him. It the knowlege of who we are that allows us to BE who we are. It is the knowledge of what we have that equips and empowers us to use what we have. To GIVE what we have. And, again, what we have... who we are... is love. You can't love until you know that you are loved. We love, because He first loved us. You have to receive before you can release. But you receive SO THAT you can release. You fill yourself to overflowing with what you've already been filled with, and that's how what's inside comes out. Because whatever you believe is inside WILL come out. It has to. It's too big not to. Your belief in it MAKES it come out. Not by effort, but by faith. Whatever you put your faith in--be it the lie of the world or the truth of God--in what manifests in your life. So you don't have to try to make anything happen. What needed to happen... alreadly happened. What needed to happen... was the cross. That was when, and how, we (who were already created in His image in the beginning) were conformed to His image. That's when we stopped wandering around in the dark and began to see that the light was shining. The light of the world. The light of life. The light of love. The light that shines in order to help us see clearly. The light, which is the Word, which is love, that is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. It shows us where to go... by showing us who we are. It shows us how to get to where we need to go by showing us how to love. And this is so good to me--God shows us how to love... by showing us how we are loved. The New Commandment for the New Man is to love one another as Jesus loves us. So all we have to do is, one more time, receive and release His love. Let Him love us and love Him back by loving each other. Fight the good fight of faith and lay hold of the gift we've been given. Experience and enjoy that gift--of eternal life--by giving it away. By sharing it. By laying our lives down for our friends, and by understanding that we destroy our enemies by MAKING them our friends. It's not about hurting people who have hurt us. It's about loving people... because God loves us. It's about giving what God has given us. Giving everything we have and everything we are without worrying about how it is received. Simply giving it because it is too good to keep to ourselves!