Recovery part 3
Get away with Jesus. Walk with Him and work with Him and you'll recover your life. To me, that means that life is walking and working. Walking by faith and not by sight. Working from a posture of rest. Love is maximum effort. Love is giving everything you have and everything you are. AND to live is to love. To love is to live. So living is giving. A life of service is what the abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life of God is all about. The gift of God that has already been given to us. Not something we need to--or can--earn. You can't earn a gift. A gift must be received. And, especially in this case, in order for it to be experienced and enjoyed... it must be released. That's the Divine Order of things. That's how this whole thing works. Receive and release the love of God. Let God love you and love Him back by loving the people you come into contact with. I think the hardest part about recovering our life is that we've lost sight of what life is. We spend (waste) our three T's (Time, Talent, Treasure) looking for love in all the wrong places. We are so desperate to fill the God-shaped (love-shaped) void inside of us that we will look for love anywhere. We look for love in all the wrong places, and then can't understand why we can't find what we're looking for. Look at James 4:2 (NLT), "You want what you don't have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can't get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don't have what you want because you don't ask God for it." Go to the source, man! God is love. If that's what you're looking for... that's where you'll find it. Going boldly to the Throne of Grace in order to find grace to help in time of need makes perfect sense to me. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord because he knew where to look for it. You have not, because you ask not. Make your requests known to God. Don't worry about anything, but pray about everything. Pray without ceasing. Be grateful for what you have instead of upet about what you don't have. It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got. You have been given all things that pertain to life and godliness. What else could you possibly need? (And that's another key--distinguishing between wants and needs.) I believe the simplest way to love someone (anyone, everyone) is to see a need and meet it. Don't worry about if you think they "deserve" it. Don't try to make them earn it. Just give what you've got. Let it out without worrying about things like "deserve" or "earn." Freely you have been given, freely you can give. Fill yourself to overflowing with what God has filled you with. Just let it out. And in that way experience and enjoy it. Everything is better when it is shared. Everything is better when you experience it together. This life is about connections. Relationships. The bonds of love. So how can we recover our lives if we are concerned with everything and anything else BUT love? When we major on the majors and minor on the minors we find a lot more common ground. And the ground is most common at the cross. That's where we find God's love in it's most pure and powerful form. He loved us so much He died for us. And because of that love we ought to love each other in that same way. Esteeming each other higher than ourselves. Giving what we've got. Laying our own lives down for each other. If you want to recover your life you have to "lose" it. You have to give it away. Because that's what love is: Love is giving!