Fullness of Life in Love
The Lord, your God, is in the midst of you, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with joy. He will rest in his love. He will rejoice over you with singing. — Zephaniah 3:17
Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling fragrance. — Ephesians 5:2
Author
Faustino de Jesús Zamora Vargas
Summary: God’s love transforms the heart surrendered to Christ: it heals, strengthens, and brings a peace and joy that we need to share. Christ’s self-giving, death, and resurrection give us new hope and teach us a new way to love. Abiding in Christ is not about displaying religiosity, but about loving God fully and our neighbors as ourselves. Though giving up selfishness is difficult, we are called to replace “I” with “we,” to put ourselves in the place of those who suffer, and to offer them compassion and help. The fullness of life in Christ is revealed in love shared with others.
The heart that has surrendered to Christ needs to express love. It cannot remain still and indifferent. The joy of the Lord is the expression of His love through a heart that has experienced a special touch of the Spirit. Knowing the love of God is a supernatural experience that heals and strengthens, that brings a peace and joy we cannot hide and need to share.
A Christian is known by the way they reflect God’s love in their life by abiding in Christ. God held nothing back in giving us His most precious offering of love in His beloved Son. The salvation of the world in exchange for His blood, His life for ours, His death for our life, His resurrection for the sinful person’s new birth. Fullness of life in Christ is the certainty of a new hope, of a new way to love.
The love that has grown within us by the grace of God can work miracles, bring about wonders, clothe the soul in mercy when unbelief peers through the window of our human passions. It is God’s “love that covers everything” that lifts us to heights where all things abound. Our problem is that we do not know how to share it. We love ourselves too much to choose sacrifice for the sake of others. Love your neighbor as yourself? Mere altruism to today’s world, which seeks glory for itself; unfinished business for many Christians.
Christ lives so that we may have life with Him and learn to love as He does, not so that we may display Him in the showcase of religiosity, seeking to fill voids and make up for shortcomings that only He can fill. When the Pharisees, with deliberate double standards, asked Him about the most important commandment, the Lord “…answered and said: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. (Luke 10:27)
Where is the love for my brother? The apostle John wrote: This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. So we too ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. (1 John 3:16)
A life full of love is not love to be kept or hoarded, but love that replaces “I” with “we.” Trying to see the world through God’s eyes is difficult, but we have been called to compassion, to set in motion those inner impulses that Jesus’ hand awakened so that we would bring glory to His name by putting ourselves in others’ shoes. All the blood of Christ fits in a cup of brotherly embrace for the one in need of love, the one crying out for health amid illness, the mother who weeps for a child, the one given up as hopeless with no option but their own misfortune. The world might believe if we lived lives of love. Fullness in Christ is an abundance of love. Share it!
God bless you!