Love Letter part 1
I want to give the ending away right at the beginning of this Rant series. Ready? You are God's love letter to the world. You are the visible expression of the invisible God. The God who is love. You are what love looks like. You were created in love, for love, by love. And if you've ever wondered why you're here (and who hasn't?) that's the answer. You are here to be loved by God and to love Him back by loving people. Got it? Good. Now lets quote my memory verse to try to back up some of those bold statements. 2 Corinthians 3:2 in the Message Bible, "You yourselves are all the endorsement we need. Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you." In the King James it reads, "Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men." Did you catch that? Our lives are the letter than is written in our hearts. The love letter than God has written to humanity. Known and read of all men just by looking at us. And, by the way, people ARE looking at you. Watching you. For a variety of reasons. Some people are watching you because they want you to fall. But our God is the One who can keep us from falling. Some people are watching you because they look up to you. They want to be like you. And as a father of a six year old mini-me, I can tell you that that one can be even scarier than the first one. My prayer every single night is for God to help me be the man that Logan needs me to be. Its important for people to have role models. But even more important that we--as role models--are modeling God. Modeling love. Because when people read the letter of our heart they see what's in our heart. Let me say it this way: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:21). Jesus said that. Its in the red letters. And I've found it to be absolutely true. If you want to know what people really care about, just follow the money. Watch what they spend their money on. Listen to what they talk about. Especially what they brag about. And I know the old saying about how we spend money we don't have on things we don't need in order to impress people that don't matter. But even then, if that's what you're doing, you're doing it because that's where your heart is. I think people do what they do for one of two reasons: 1. They don't know they are loved and are trying to get love any way they can. 2. They know (and believe) that they are loved and are trying to share that love any way they can. There's not much in between. But what I want to focus on in this Rant series is, as the title would suggest, what we, who know what the love letter says, ought to be doing so that others can read it and know it too. And, quite simply, what we do... is let God love the hell out of us and then turn around and love the hell out of the people that we come into contact with. Receive and release the love we've been given. Receive it BY releasing it. Fill ourselves to overflowing with what God has already filled us with. Let what's inside come out, by knowing and believing that its in there. That HE'S in there. Knowing and believing that God loves us. Letting Him love us. Keeping our hearts open so that His love can come out. (Again, its already in there. We don't need to let it in. We just need to BELIEVE its in and let it out. That's called breathing though, and we'll get to that.) God wrote His Word (which is Jesus, which is love) on our hearts. We are His love letter to the world!