Saturday, August 21, 2010

Lord, Teach Me To Love...

" In heaven everything and everyone is lovable , but as the Lord Jesus said,"If ye love them which love you what reward have ye?"Matthew 5:26 In heaven everyone loves everyone else and in hell no one loves anyone. But on earth we are in a perfect environment for learning to love as God loves: to abandon ourselves to the apparently unlovely people who remind us that in many ways we are still very unlovely ourselves.

Love is not a feeling it is an overmastering passion to help and bless and deliver and comfort and strengthen and give joy to others just as the Lord Jesus always did.

Here on earth we have to opportunity to do what the God of love does all the time, and to learn to abandon ourselves to loving, to giving, to seeking, and to saving others. Not a lovely feeling of affection, or physical pleasure and satisfaction. But the extreme eternal ecstasy of creating happiness and good and blessed things for others to enjoy. To cast ourselves down in happy giving, asking for nothing in return except the joy of so doing. When we really begin to and practice that lesson we shall begin to feel "at home" in the eternal world of selfless love.

It is not a feeling one waits for, nor some person to evoke that love. It is an attitude of will. I will cast myself down in giving. The lower I go the more love I am able to transmit from God to others, just like the Lord of love Himself, who was not content until He found and took the lowest place in the universe." -Hannah Hurnard

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