Pathway of love - Confined by love

When we can HEAR with the right kind of hearing (Attentive hearing - shema). Then we can DO with the right kind of doing, a partnership of loving with God.

Galatians 5:6 Nothing counts for or accomplishes anything except faith that works though love.

CONFINED BY GOD’S LOVE   

2Corinthians 5:14 For the love of Christ compels/constrains/confines us (Luke 8:45  - the throng, Luke19:43 - the armies, Luke 22:63 - the guards), because this is how we see it: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh (Flesh – the disposition that behaves as if God is absent from our lives). 

MADE IN HIS IMAGE

We are made in the image and likeness of God. He is not made in the image and likeness of us. 

This lesser mortality of humanity can sink to the lowest depths of darkness and yet it can soar to great heights of light. God cannot sink to any depths of darkness (1John 1:3 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all).

THE COMMON THREAD

So what is the one great common thread between God and us? It is that we can love like God loves (He cannot do malice or lie like we lie (Numbers 23:19) and, God destroys evil for our protection) 

So what does it feel like for God to love, so that we might know how to love?  All I can do is ask the question.

Does God feel like he is losing out because he loves, and he may not get a lot of love back from his creation that he loves so dearly – the creation (us) that he sent his Son to die for? But he certainly gets the fullness of love back from his Son (so what about us?). That love of his Son (and Holy Spirit) totally fulfills and pleases him. 

LOVE AND SUFFERING

God is not an unhappy God because of our less-ness and the disorder of this world. He is blessed in loving. His love allows him to have compassion on our suffering and to feel it with us and to not lose the joy and fulfillment of loving us. He knows he can reconcile the love and the suffering because he sees the end from the beginning – that all things are working out together for the good of those who DO love him. 

God knows and sees suffering as an essential part of being a lesser mortal in an imperfect creation where (non eternal) things perish. 

That is why Jesus suffered and was made perfect and complete in his suffering, because love is the only remedy, healing, and antidote for suffering. God’s Love is the only wisdom that can be found in suffering, otherwise it is unkind and meaningless. That is how a parent can allow a child to suffer getting a needle in order to avoid a life threatening disease. Suffering is an essential aspect of love because it puts self second in order to bless and do good WITH GOD for all mankind (sound familiar? - John 3:16 - both – 1John 3:16 By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren). This prison is the greatest freedom and empowerment that exists. It unleashes the greatest force in the universe.

That same love is what Holy Spirit puts in our hearts.

Holy Spirit places God’s love into our hearts first, for us to experience. It is only then that we can love along with him – unto others. 1 John 4:19 We love Him because He first loved us. 

The prison of his love to us, the confinement, becomes so large and broad and deep that it crowds out all other prisons - of fear or self indulgence or regret or disappointment or hopelessness or the pain of grief.

WHAT TO DO

The first task is to be held on to in the embrace of his love. That becomes our confinement until it fills and enlarges our heart.