The Nature of Love part 1
"There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13 NLT). Love comes in many shapes and sizes and forms. It is so simple--to love is to give--but so vast. Everybody receives love in different ways and everyone loves in different ways. But I think it's important to understand the nature of love--or our love nature--because it's only in understanding love that we can understand ourselves and each other. I'm completely convinced that people do what they do for one of two reasons: 1. They don't know they are loved and they want to be loved, so they try to get it--try to earn it. 2. They DO know they are loved and instead of trying to earn something that is freely given, they share what they have. That's why it's so important to understand 1 John 4:19. The New Living Translation puts it like this, "We love each other because he loved us first." We have to go to the source OF love in order to find that thing that we thought we were missing (before the cross, before Jesus gave His life for us and gave His life to us... before we were filled with the Holy Spirit). And then, once we receive the Holy Spirit--our love receptor--we can begin to experience the love that God has always had for us. Remember, the cross didn't change us into something that God could love. He always has and always will love us. The cross changed us into something that could RECEIVE God's love. Our old nature--the beast nature--understood "an eye for an eye." It understood, "if you do good you'll be rewarded and if you do evil you'll be punished." It understood the Law of Moses (even though it was powerless to keep that same Law). But it didn't understand love. It didn't understand mercy, or grace. It didn't understand LIFE, because instead of eating from the Tree of Life, it only ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To live is to love and to love is to live. But that truth almost seems to fly in the face of what Jesus said about the greatest love one can have. Until you understand Jesus' words in Mark 8:35 (NLT), "If you try to hang onto your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it." We only truly live when we give up OUR lives--the Old Man who died and was buried on the cross--and receive HIS life--the New Man, the abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life of love! We don't live by taking (despite what the world would have you believe.) We live by giving. Giving what we've got. Giving ourselves. Laying down our lives--and not necessarily in the physical sense that Jesus literally did both for us and as us on the cross, but by esteeming others higher than ourselves. Not stepping on people when they're down so we can look or feel a little bit bigger, but by getting down there with them and helping them up. That's the nature of love. Helping people. Giving them what they need. And that's what we've been equipped and empowered to do because that what Jesus did FOR us and that what's Jesus is doing right now IN us and THROUGH us and AS us!