Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying
the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another
deeply, from the heart.
1 Peter 1:22
Final
modeling session of the week, ladies. You will all have to agree that the
logical last part of our M.O.D.E.L acrostic not only has to be LOVE, but to LOVE deeply, from the heart. Love undergirds, encompasses and pulls
it all together. Without love, as 1 Corinthians 13 so eloquently tells us, all
else fails.
The
most basic truth about love is not to be overlooked: God is love (1 John 4:16). So we, created in the image of God
(Genesis 1:27), have those seeds of agape love in us.
The
concept of agape is so much bigger than my finite brain can comprehend. Timothy
Keller describes it beautifully in the final chapter of his book The Reason for God. In summary, our
Triune God has always been in a love relationship with Himself: “The Spirit
lives to glorify the Son, the Son to glorify the Father, the Father to glorify
the Son.” Each seeks the glory of the other, not of self. Each loves the other
sacrificially, losing self for the joy of the other.
When
God created man, He essentially pulled him into that circle of love. It was
man’s disobedience that catapulted him out of the circle, into self-love.
Jesus’ entry into the human orbit was His invitation to man to hop back in.
When we choose Jesus, we purify ourselves
by obeying the truth, as Peter said. The end result, the remainder of 1
John 4:16: we know and rely on the love
God has for us. …Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
The
challenge to us is to: love one another
deeply, from the heart; perhaps not all that difficult. After all, God has poured out his love into our hearts
by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us (Romans 5:5). The Message tells us
that God’s agape love is so abundant, we can’t possibly round up enough containers to hold it all. To model Him, all we
need to do is let it overflow, from the heart.
What
an impact this week has made on me ladies, as together we constructed an
easy-to-remember M.O.D.E.L to follow.
It began with the imprint of the M-ark
of Jesus on you and on me. O-bey, D-esign, E-cho, and L-ove
followed. May we rely on the Spirit to leave His imprint in our wake, wherever
we go.
Nancy P
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