From Deficit to Abundance in Love
I don’t know about you, but there are days where it can be incredibly difficult to love everyone the way that Jesus calls us to.
We are called to love, and not just the people that we like, or want to love, but to love everyone.
Love everyone: this does not mean that you trust everyone, or even like everyone, however, God asks us to love others as a response to his love that we have received. He loved first, and we love because of his love. It is impossible on our own to purely love everyone. We literally cannot do it all the time, for everyone, in every circumstance. We can try our best to love, but that is all that we can do on our own. This is where we need to go one step further and invite God to fill out and fill up wherever we feel a poverty in the area of love with the abundance and fullness of His love.
All too often, we end up settling on only loving to the level of our ability to love. However, if we love only out of our poverty of love we will never be able to fully express or experience the love that God intends for us to enjoy or to share. In the situations and relationships where we experience a poverty of love, where we have nothing left to give, where we feel an inability to love to the level that we want too, or that we have come to the extent of our own love, this is the very place where God wants to meet us. This is where Jesus wants to be invited into. Where we are lacking, He has more than enough love to go around.
This is where it gets real for most people. We want to love others, really we do, but it can be so difficult to love well. At these times we are acutely aware of our deficit of love. We love our kids but find it hard to love them the in the ways that they need our love. We love our spouse, but we feel like we hit a wall in certain areas of love in our marriage. We love others as long as they are easy to love or happen to share our opinions, or world views. When we come to those places we know that we have room to grow, but also that these are the very places that God wants to meet us and fill us up with His love.
When you realize you can love with the love of God in you for another, that is game changer. There is no deficit of love with God for anyone. Including you. You are often the hardest person for you to love. Have you ever noticed that it is easier to love others, or at least try too, than it is to love and speak well of yourself?
This begins to shift when you choose to receive the love of God for you, and let that knowledge affect you to the core. Until this shift happens it will be hard for you to love you the way that God loves you. Take that in.
When you know that you are loved, you will live differently in those spaces in which you feel you are not loved or accepted. When you’re in Christ and understand that you are loved regardless of what you bring to the table, that you are loved in spite of the fact that your sin should make you unloveable to God, then your identity as one who is loved will inform and transform you. The most important thing that you can know about yourself, is that you are loved by God, not for what you bring to the table, but what He brought to the cross, and what He dealt with once and for all at the cross. Now Jesus, who is perfect love, continues to lovingly deal with your sin, shame, and brokenness with and for you. And all the while, He is interceding for you before the Father.
The way of love, has so much to do with embracing the reality and the identity of who we are in Christ. If God is love and he’s calling us to love, then part of our identity (at the core of who we are) must not only include, but be built upon the foundation of love and walked out in the way of love.
The deficit of love that we feel at times does not have to be the way that we live moving forward. The places where we feel a poverty of love do not have to stay that way. Your past does not have to be your reality moving forward. When we come to Jesus and receive His love, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, we can access and embrace the love of the Father. It is from this place where we can live with His abundance of love, not just for us, but also for the people that we love to love, and the people that we choose to love.
Love is a choice.
If you are feeling stuck in your experience of love, held back from encountering God’s love or even just aware of your own poverty in the area of love, there is hope! Jesus made a way for us to embrace and receive the love of God. Start with Jesus, receive what He has done, invite God to show you His love, and ask Him to help you to accept the love that he offers freely.
