The Power of Love — A LifeWords Devotion

I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. (NLT)

We sometimes imagine that our basic problem is that we don’t love God enough. Apart from trying to figure out just what “enough” means, this is mistaken. Our basic problem is that we don’t know how much God loves us. His love is primary, our love is responsive.

Our lives are to be lived out of a deep awareness of how much we are loved. When it comes to his loving of us, God throws out the ration book. He does not dole it out in some miserly way so that we get just enough to survive on. He pours it out lavishly, but we so often fail to grasp it and so our lives are not rooted in love but in fear or guilt or shame or insecurity.

We may think we are not worthy of that love. In which case we have to realise that the love of God is not a payback for our good behaviour but a free gift offered to all, worthy or not. Or we may wonder how anybody could possibly love us because we have had so little experience of it from other human beings. In which case we have to realise that God is not like those other human beings whose love for us is ego driven, fickle, or sometimes disastrously misguided.

The bedrock reality of our lives of faith is that God loves us and that Jesus is evidence of this. All else follows from this. Being loved is the rich soil from which all our fruitfulness and fulfilment grows.

Blessings

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David