We throw the word ‘love’ around a lot.
We love sports teams and food and spa days and luxury cars.
We love places and memories and attributes in ourselves and others (all good things!).
We love people.
It is in those (healthy) relationships that we get a glimpse of what Christ’s love looks like.
Selflessness and loyalty and sacrifice and permanence.
Perhaps because it is such a common word, we sometimes lose a sense of what the true, highest form of love really is.
We come to equate it with indulgence or gratification. Something to be embraced if it gives us what we want, but to be abandoned if we no longer see its value.
The wonder of Christ’s love is that it doesn’t seek anything for itself.
Always and forever, Christ’s love is for our good.
Because He ‘descended below all things’ He knows exactly what it feels like to be a mortal being, subject to a fallen world with its pulls, appetites and deceptions.
And His love encompasses that part of us, meeting us in that place with perfect empathy.
But because He loves His Father (and us) perfectly, He lived a life that never gave in to any of the tugs of the natural, fallen world.
So He knows the glory and wholeness and power of a life lived higher.
His love, therefore, seeks to show us the way and lift us there.
Elevating us above the temporary and self-serving, to know an elevated love.
If we accept this love, all of it, even the invitations to leave behind the elements of the fallen world that exert the greatest pressure on us, His power (motivated by His love) eases that pressure over time.
We are changed and enabled so that the fallen world has less influence and pull. Our ‘natures’ are transformed.
From our unweighted position, we see more. We feel the liberation and beauty of life lived outside the constraints of the natural man.
We are lifted, little by little, to appreciate and know and love life lived with Him and like Him.
Elevated by His love that is constantly, insistently and everlastingly for us and with us in the journey.
