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Monday, April 8, 2019

As He Has Loved You


It is impossible to love God without the love of Jesus alive in you! You can’t love God enough with your own self effort. Making yourself love God would be of your own works and would be self-righteous. One day an expert in religious law asked Jesus what should he do to inherit eternal life. In return, Jesus asked him what the law said, and the law expert answered, “you must love the Lord your God with all you heart, all your strength, and with all your mind.” Loving God with all your heart, strength, and mind is the greatest commandment under the law according to Jesus. But Jesus came to fulfill the law, and with His love for you on the Cross and His gift of righteousness for your sin, everything changed. Loving God was no longer about how much you could make yourself love God. It was all about His incredible love for you that set you free. You now love because He first loved you. Just as the woman with the alabaster box, you realize how much you have been forgiven. When you know you are forgiven by Jesus, you love abundantly as He has loved you. Rivers of living water flow from Calvary through you—an unstoppable love that springs up from your spirit where you have been reborn.

 “This is real love,” John wrote, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins” (1 John 4:10, NLT). You can’t work up a love for God either through feelings or by working enough to prove you love Him. Jesus also told the law expert that part of the law’s greatest instruction was loving others as yourself. Love is born in you at Calvary. When His Spirit lives in you, you can easily love God and unconditionally love others because He first loved you. Jesus gave everything for you. Nothing was of you. It was all Jesus. If you want His love to live in you and flow without regard, you need a revelation of the Cross—what His finished work on Calvary accomplished in your life. Don’t just talk about being free of sin. You are free of sin. Don’t work to be new work in Jesus. You are new in Jesus. You walk in NEWNESS of life. And that newness of life is not about your behavior. It is about your new identity in Him. Your newness of life is Jesus alive and living in you. His righteous Spirit has claimed your sinful one! When you realize how completely—freely and without judgment—you are forgiven, you know you are loved MUCH, and because of His incredible love you sin LESS!  You love Him as He has loved you.

“This way of faith is very different from the way of law,” Paul wrote, “which says, “It is through obeying the law that a person has life” (Galatians 3:12, NLT). The way of faith says that it is only through believing in Jesus Christ that a person has life. You have the new life of Jesus in you. Not from anything you have done, but from His free gift of salvation. Learn what Calvary has given you—a new identity. You have freely received His blameless life as your own. Be continually renewed daily by putting on this new identity until you are transformed in the way you think—until His revelation of grace breathes truth into your heart.

You are not loved because of what you have done. You are loved because of who He is. As He has loved you, you are free to love Him.

© Lynn Lacher 2019

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