Our Response to His Love

     Loving the Lord more will make you love others better.  Worshiping Him with your whole heart will make you more loyal to your other responsibilities.  It is not that we love Him to the exclusion of all else, it is that we remember and live by the principle that says, He is Lord.  He is FIRST.  He is SUPREME.  He is our first love.  To please Him should be our greatest joy, to grieve Him, our sharpest pain.  He who has given His life for us has a right to ask that we give no less for Him.  He has loved us with an everlasting, all-encom-passing, unconditional love.  He has loved us in total and complete abandonment, even to laying down His life for us on the Cross. 

We can never even begin to express the depths of gratitude we should feel toward Him in response to what He has done for us.  All of eternity will not be long enough to praise, honor and adore Him, who has ransomed and redeemed our souls and taken us out of darkness and brought us into the light of His holiness; out of the coldness of despair and into the warmth of His unfathomable love.

    May our desires be His desires; our highest goal to bring Him joy. May we not rest until we have poured out our lives in sacrificial love.  May our greatest delight be to do His will, and to that end, may we give our attention diligently to the Word that we may understand more clearly His divine intention and come more fully to have the mind of Christ.  (See Romans 12:2; Philippians 2:5)

Taken from Total Love by Frances Roberts

“We are told in the New Testament that Christians are to love those who treat them badly…this is a love that costs, love that gives until it hurts, and even when it knows it won’t get anything in return. In order for the world to see that kind of love, they need to see Christians who dare to follow Christ’s example…”

Joni Eareckson Tada

“Contemplate the Love of Christ, and you will love. Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ’s character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness. There is no other way. You cannot love on cue. You can only look at the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and grow into likeness to it. Look at this Perfect character, this Perfect Life; look at the great sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all through life, and ending it upon the cross of Calvary, and you must love Him. And loving Him, you must become like Him for Love begets love.”

Henry Drummond