The Life part 3
A life of love. Which is a life of service. Because love is giving. Laying your life down for your friends. Giving everything you have and everything you are. A life of love. A life worth living. And the key to the whole thing is BEING loved. Because you can't give what you don't have. We CAN lay our lives down for our friends BECAUSE Jesus laid His life down for us. Laid it down so He could pick it back up. Gave it to us so we could experience it as He lives it in us, and through us, and as us. I think the biggest stumbling block "Christians" run into is trying to live Jesus' life. Because no one can live Jesus' life except Jesus. We try to follow in His foot steps, and we find out pretty quickly that they're too big. What we need to do is just be still and know that He is God. Let Jesus make His own foot steps with our feet. I did a Guerrilla Gospel video not too long ago about being a "follower of God." And about how "following" Him is really letting Him carry us. Being a follower of love. Letting love guide the way. If you want to live your best life--and, really, who doesn't?--you have to let love in. Because you can't give what you don't have. And you can only give what do have. If you want to feel love... the best way to do so is to love others. Love is what makes Jesus' abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life abundant, everlasting, and eternal! Its like we're willing to trade the life we have for some idea of what might happen in the "afterlife." But Jesus said it pretty clearly in John 10:10, "The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." He came to give us LIFE. Right here and now. Because He IS life. And He gave us Himself. He didn't just give His life FOR us on the cross... He gave His life TO us. Because He wanted us to have it. But if Jesus IS the Life (and He is), then you can't live it without Him. If LOVE is the life... you can't live without it (HIM). I know there are a lot of different pictures of God in the Bible. Light, Spirit, Consuming Fire, and Love pop to mind. But that last one is the all encompassing one. Love. Love is light. Love is Spirit. Love is the Consuming Fire. Love is the Way, the Truth, and the Life! God is love. Jesus is God in the flesh, love in a body. God in YOUR flesh. Love in YOUR body. What I think I'm trying to say is that we need to stop separating things. Stop drawing lines in the sand. And realize that when Jesus remade the world in His image through the cross--the Messianic rebirth of the world--that consuming fire consumed everything except itself. Everything except Himself. Everything except love! That's what's left. That's what we have. That's who we are. That's HOW Jesus made sure that we have--right now--life, and that more abundantly. He gave us His Spirit--The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth that leads and guides us into all truth--so that we might stop trying to earn the love of God and instead simply know it and believe it. Receive it and release it. Receive it BY releasing it. Release it BY receiving it. The Holy Spirit is our love receptor. He is the Spirit that equips and empowers us to live, by letting us call out, "Abba, Father." By showing us who we are--God's beloved Son in whom He is well pleased--by showing us who God is--our loving heavenly Father. That's how we live--a Son is empowered by the love of His Father. Empowered to live. Empowered to love!