Love

Yesterday I was thanking God for love. And I was trying to think of a way to express my love for him. What I thought of was something akin to thirst or hunger, like the verse in Psalm 42:1, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.”

But then I realised that that wasn't my love for God. That's my need for God. That's my soul and bodies inability to live without him. And it's true. I need God like I need oxygen. Yes, I could hold my breath and deny that need. I could convince myself that it's not necessary and say, “see, I don't need to breath” but soon I will. Soon I would find myself gasping and my lungs and every other part of my body would be screaming out for oxygen. And if I could hold out long enough, still ignoring it, I'd pass out till my body would take over. If I found a way to thwart my body then I'd die, because really, oxygen is necessary. We know this. It seems silly to even type it. Of course we know this. But it's the same thing when we ignore our need for God. We watch the world crumble around us and still say it's not true. Some turn to him early, some wait until they collapse and finally see their need for God. Others ignore and ignore and stop their souls from crying out to him till they die.


Somehow that fact is hard to see than the fact that we need oxygen, but it's the same thing.

I pondered this and then wondered, but if that's not love, what is?

Then it hit me. The love is in the fact that God saw us all standing here on earth with out blue faces and pillows over our noises mouthing the words: “I can do it on my own!”

And he didn't laugh. He cried for us, and then he sent Jesus to move our pillows and show us the way out.

That's love. He created us, we ignored him and tried to kill ourselves and he rescued us. He gave us life by dying himself. So now “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). I can't say I ever really understood that idea until last night. When I realised that before we know Christ, before we realise what it is he's done, we have no hope of loving him. We can't even see that we're suffocating our own souls. And then once we realise that he's taken the burden off of our shoulders and placed it on his own, and that he's opened up our airway so we can breathe, then we can finally love him. It's through that that we can fill our lungs up with oxygen and sing him songs about our love, because first he loved us enough to give up his dignity and get down in the dirt with us, to put his hands in the mess and fix what we'd mucked up.

No God's love for us and our love for God isn't expressed in our need for him. The love is that he decided to save us from ourselves. And our love is giving everything he saved back to him.

So there's my valentine's day thoughts this year.

Jessica