True Love

I’m glad Christians don’t have to pluck daisy petals just right (“loves me…loves me not”) or rely on the notoriously fickle whims of human devotion to get and keep an assurance of being loved. Our Father has promised His faithfulness to us. So why do we often take our eyes off Him and veer toward earthlings? Maybe it’s because people are tangible, apprehended through the physical senses. That may give us hope, consciously or subconsciously, that we can “adapt” some likely person to meet our needs when and how we want them met.

God, on the other hand, “is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). Uh-oh! That means we must surrender to the One who cannot be manipulated. It’s easier to nail the proverbial “Jell-O to the wall” than to predict or control the movements of the Spirit of God (John 3:8).

That’s okay. We don’t have to. We need only read and accept the evergreen declarations found in His Word to rest easy in our eternal significance. We are told “His love endures forever” (repeated over and over in Psalm 136), and nothing will ever be able to separate us from it (Romans 8:38-39). That is the primary relationship we need to cultivate. The result is “true affection for God and man, growing out of God’s love for and in us” (1 Cor. 13:13).

“No love of the human heart is safe unless it has been satisfied by God first.” — Oswald Chambers