Skip to main content

Repentance, Prayer and End Time: Christian Jargon in Crisis?

Post a Comment

Nurture Love in Your Heart



You are created by God to receive love and give love. This article explores different aspects of this purpose of God.

You can Experience God’s Love

God is love. He loves us with His everlasting love (Jer.31.3). God’s love manifested to us when Jesus died for sinners. God’s love is self-sacrificing, self-giving, unconditional and unchanging. God’s love for you is portrayed in Luke 15 in the story of a loving Father who ran to his homecoming son with compassion, embraced him, kissed him, gave him a new dress and prepared a great meal for him. He forgave his son’s sin and accepted him unconditionally. God is full of love, mercy and grace which He shows to the undeserved.

To nurture the love of God in your heart, Paul encourages us to pray that God’s love may increase in your heart (Eph. 3.14-19). God has been pouring this great love into your heart through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5.5). You can feel it, experience it, know it and grow in it. Being open and sensitive to the Holy Spirit will help you to allow Holy Spirit to pour more of God’s love in you. Nurture a heart that is filled with God’s love.

Love God

The greatest and the first commandment of God is that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Jesus asked Peter three times that “Do you love me?” This is the heart of God for everyone – you should love God. Intensity of this intimacy and love is revealed when God calls you as His son, friend, bride and brother. You are expected to be a lover of God.

To love God, nurture a heart that longs for God like the Psalmist (Ps.42) – a heart that is passionately seeking, longing and thirsting for a face to face experience with God (v.2). As you develop such a heart, you choose to find time to sit at the feet of Jesus like Mary (Luke 10:39). Spending time with Jesus in private becomes more enjoyable and the best part of your life. Further, you will give your precious things to Jesus wholeheartedly like Mary who anointed Jesus with the costly oil (John 11:2). For Mary, Jesus was her supreme value.

 As you grow in loving Jesus, you develop a strong intimacy with God. Jesus becomes everything in your life. You value Jesus more than his blessing, your ministry or anything else. As you grow in intimacy with God, your life will be saturated with the thick presence of God. The presence of God becomes an experiential reality in your life. As you encounter God’s presence so intimately, your heart will be continuously renewed and transformed. You become more like Jesus and the fruits of the Holy Spirt manifest in you greatly. You do not need to strive for it, they just manifest.

God is interested in a loving relationship with you, not in a religion. Religion is all about doing spiritual things without a heart to heart relationship with God or a face to face experience with God. David reflected about this in Ps. 51.16-17: “you will not delight in sacrifice...you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart…” Jews searched for the eternal life in scriptures but they did not search for Jesus, the source of eternal life (John 5:39-40). Likewise, do not replace a heartfelt intimacy with God and the love of God with performance-legalism oriented spiritual activities.

Love Others

The second greatest commandment of God to us is to love others. We must love one another (1Jn. 4.7). If you do not love, you do not know God who is love (John 4.8). As you abide in love, you abide in God (1Jn. 4.16). God asks you to love your wife, children, parents, enemies and everyone. God wants love as the foundation of all our relationships.

To nurture love for others, firstly, fill your heart with God’s love and intimacy with God. This brings tenderness to your heart. It increases your capacity to love others and build an intimate relationship with others. Secondly, keep switching on love and stop switching off love. Bitterness, hurts and unforgiveness can switch off love in you and destroy your capacity to love and develop intimacy. The path to switch on love especially in hurting situations: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor.13:4-8).

Without love, what you have is not a gain (1Cor. 13.3). Love is eternal and greatest of all. Love is the bottom line of everything. God calls us to build a kingdom of love – families, churches and relationships filled with love. Let us nurture a life that is consumed by love.


Note: I had written this article for The Aurora magazine which is published by NLF, Kochi. It has published in The Aurora, Issue 2, October, 2018. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for commenting.

Popular posts from this blog

New Testament Background: History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age

Philosophy and Religion 1. Philosophical schools and Philosophic Religion (a) The Academy and Platonism Xenocrates and Speusippus, Plato’s students, created Platonic system which popularized Demonology that contributed philosophical legitimacy for beliefs related with demons and thus laid the foundation for their later propagation in philosophical and theological literature. Middle Academy of III and II BCE had dispute with Stoic and other philosophical schools, in that process the Academy fell into skepticism. Antiochus of Ascalon broke this skepticism and gave up the opposition to Stoic. Further, Platonism wide spread in I BCE as a cultural development and development of dualistic anthropology and cosmology associated with this. Plato proposed two world souls: good and evil souls. The Stoic philosopher Posidonius took this dualistic idea and he differentiates two worlds in his cosmology: the celestial world and the sublunar world. Moreover, he developed trichot
Post a Comment
Read more

Repentance, Prayer and End Time: Christian Jargon in Crisis?

I have witnessed how Christians respond in times of personal, local, national or international situations of crisis. Most of the time I came across Christian responding following three ways: 1. We need to repent.  I have absolutely no doubt about the need for repentance in crisis. All the prophets and ministers come up with this message, especially in seasons of crisis. Here are my questions: when you say repent in crisis, do we imply that the crisis is the judgment from God? Can we attribute all the crises to God? Another direction in which I am concerned, why are we preaching aggressively repentance ONLY in the context of crisis. When everything is going fine, do we need repentance? I believe that repentance must be part of our daily devotional life before God. It is not something that we need to preach and think only in the season of crisis. Repentance is an essential part of daily Christian life. Moreover, let us not forget that before we preach repentance to others, we need
Post a Comment
Read more

Great Command and Great Commission

It seems to me that sometimes we over emphasize great commission over great commandment of Jesus. The great and first commandment of Jesus: Mark 12:29-31   says 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (ESV). One thing that should precede great commission is to love God and love people. This is the foundation of everything. Abiding in love means we abide in God (John 15). We need a deep revelation and experience of love of God. If we are not touched and filled with depth of God’s love (cf.Rom. 5.4), then we will not be able to love others. Let us pray that the love of God may increase in us, so that our love for God and people around us may increase. The very foundation o
Post a Comment
Read more