Living in Love

It isn’t enough to simply acknowledge intellectually that God loves you. To restrict God’s love to the intellect alone will greatly limit our ability to enjoy Him. The raging fire of His love seeks to permeate your mind, your emotions, and your will. Then, having ravaged your soul, His love will leap from your life, through your actions, onto those around you, like a fire that jumps from one tree in the forest to another.

God wants you to both know and to feel His love. There seems to be an overemphasis in many circles, either by focusing on experiencing God through the mind to the exclusion of the emotions, or vice-versa. One group accuses the other of emotionalism while the second views the former as being either afraid or ignorant of the Holy Spirit. One may claim to be led by the Bible, while the other professes to be led by the Spirit, but neither extreme is a biblical position.

God wants His love to invade every part of our being. A balanced life is one in which we clearly understand His love intellectually, deeply experience His love emotionally and purposefully live out of His love volitionally. With life in balance, the written Word guides us objectively and the living Word within guides us subjectively.

From out of the center of His love, we are then able to live the carefree, abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give us. God wants you to enjoy life. He wants you to gulp it down by the gallon! Isn’t that the real we all have?

We have a powerful innate drive to drink deeply of life and, thus, of
 God — to come to the end of our lives saying that we’ve truly lived.
That this urge belongs at the heart of a person’s life makes the
circle complete. Life is good!

There is, however, another side. While we long to live this way,
most of us are actually terrified to do so. Confronted with the
opportunity to dance with life, we cling to our inhibitions and fears and
our little ways of skulking in the shadows of uninvolvement. We may
tap our toes, but we’re firmly glued to our chairs. We aren’t easily
persuaded to get up and dance.

As I read Henry David Thoreau’s, Walden Pond, I was struck by his desire to “suck the marrow from life.” It described my own zest for living. What Thoreau thought he could find in nature, I knew could be found in Jesus Christ.

Imagine a life in which the fire of God so consumes you that you lose all inhibitions; a life in which you charge forth confidently into every day with the assurance that God will guarantee your success that day. This life isn’t imaginary, it’s real! When we live from the blazing glory of His love for us, that is the life we can live.

Tony Campolo once said in a speech, “Most of us are tiptoeing through life so we can reach death safely. We should be praying, ‘If I should wake before I die.’ Life can get away from you. Don’t be satisfied with just pumping blood.” There is an abundant life for the taking for those who have the assurance of God’s unconditional love and commitment to us.