We all have a purpose in this life, designed by God to accomplish His will through us (Ephesians 2:10). He calls all of us to love Him unashamedly and uncompromisingly, and then to love our self and others with this same dedication.
At birth, God gave each of us a distinct combination of personality types. Some of the qualities of these types are negative aspects and others are positive. God’s Spirit magnifies our gifts, and He exchanges the negative traits with the fruit of His Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).
Our love for God is not some mystical or superficial concept, but it actually flows out of our innermost being throughout the day, and then it is channeled into our care and nurture for our self and others. We genuinely love our God who resides in our spirit by His Spirit, we obey His precepts, and we walk in His Spirit.
It is impossible to love God at the same time that we hate a person in our life. He gives us a prerequisite to receiving His forgiving our sins, and that is that we forgive each other. He gives us the power of His love to forgive a limitless number of times (Matthew 18:21-22).
We can carry the love for our self to extremes, and then we fall into Satan’s traps and lies; but if we neglect our basic needs and fail to appreciate who we are in Christ, we do not have the energy to truly love others.
Every humanistic thought, word, emotion and deed that we allow to dictate our behavior will lead us away from God’s path for us and onto the wide road of destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). We solve these dilemmas and find true peace and joy by living according to God’s ideals in His beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-11; Philippians 2:12-13).
When the pain and sorrow in our world threaten to overcome us, God uses trials to reveal to us the carnality still resident in our soul, and then to perfect us into Christ’s nature with His mind in us. He is our everything (Ephesians 1:23).
Prayer:
Father God, thank You for searching our heart and revealing to us any wickedness that still resides within us that will push us toward self-centered, prideful, greedy, and aggressive behavior, and for teaching us Your everlasting way instead (Psalm 139:23-24). We praise You with every breath that we take (Psalm 150:6).
Remind us that once we turn our life over to You, we move past basic survival into the realm of victory, peace and joy that transcends anything this world can ever offer to us. We want Christ to be the center of our life now and always (Colossians 3:3-4). Each new day is one that You made, and we will rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 100).
Thought for the Day:
Jesus reminds us that through His presence within us, we can exhibit true love that:
· acknowledges and accepts our personal limitations as we wait on the Lord,
· focuses our love on God’s will first before attempting to relieve the suffering in the world around us,
· desires to live in holiness,
· bears with one another with understanding,
· forgives slights and abuse,
· formulates our thoughts and emotions according to God’s Word,
· and works together with other Saints to accomplish God’s will on this earth.
