It’s easy to look around and see that the world is looking for love.
We all deeply connect with the idea of feeling known, accepted, and ultimately, loved, and are searching for it…maybe in all the wrong places as the old adage says. But more often than not, we look for it in good things: a relationship, our career, a success or goal met, our family, the next adventure or “big” thing on the horizon. We may readily run to these things to fill us with a sense of love and acceptance, but there’s a void of dissatisfaction wherever earthly love has taken residence in us where only divine love will do. There are a lot of “good” loves, but only one heavenly Great Love. Only the love of God in Christ Jesus will satisfy continually the innermost depths of our hearts, minds, and souls, to the brim and overflowing both now and forever.
Scripture tells us in 1 John 3:1: How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God, and that is what we are! Romans 8 says that nothing, not death, life, nor circumstances, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Through the Innocent Perfection who gave his life for us, we have been forever changed by the power of the cross and brought into this great love of God. This kind of love calls us by name and lifts us up. It gives us a mercy which is new every day. It allows us to live from a place of love and acceptance, not a place of striving or earning. We are simply free to respond to the love of God with our lives. Oh Lord, let us do that today!
Father, thank you that I can call you that! Father. You have poured out in great measure continually, even now, your unmatched love on me, that I would be called your child. Thank you that through Jesus I have access to the love and power of God through the Spirit. Help me to lift my eyes to you today, and let your love transform me as I cease striving and live from acceptance, not for it. Amen.