Grace to Receive Love

    I have a beautiful cat with thick gray hair which reminds me of a lot of people I meet.  It has a difficult time receiving love.  Often when I reach down to scratch its head, it runs away.  Occasionally, it will approach me, meowing to let me know it wants love.  But it can only receive my love for about one minute. 

   God made us to be loved.  It is a basic need of the human heart.  How do we know this?  Because God created us to need Him and God is love according to 1 John 4:8.  Yet, many Christ followers struggle to receive His love as well as people's love.

   I was one of them.  While I believed and preached that God loves us, I had minimal experience of it.  The problem was not on God's side. It was on my side.  This spilled over into my relationship with my wife and others, in that I had difficulty receiving their love.

   Our Father's love is like a water faucet.  The moment we become one of His children through faith in Christ, that faucet turns on cascading on us forever.  We are like a cup under it.  If we are turned right side up, we are filled with His love for us.  If we are turned upside down, we cannot be filled with His love for us.

   What causes us to be turned upside down has to do with our stinking thinking.  We are all programmed by the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we are born which we inherited from Adam.  Though unaware of this, it causes us to believe that we have to make ourselves loveable.  We gauge whether we are loveable by how well we perform, what other's think of us, how we look and what we have.

   Parents pay a critical role in this as well.  If we grow up in a family where grace is in place, we will experience a lot of unconditional love.  If we don't, we will experience a lot of rejection.  Either way, unless we understand the Gospel of grace, we will be hindered from receiving love.

   To be able to receive love, we need a revelation of Christ in us.  There is a great prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19 that I encourage you to pray often for yourself and those you care about, even as I do.  The prayer is basically asking our Father to deepen the revelation of Christ in us to us. 

   "When I think of the wisdom and scope of his plan, I fall down on my knees and pray to the Father of all the great family of God-some of them already in heaven and some down here on earth- 16 that out of his glorious, unlimited resources he will give you the mighty inner strengthening of his Holy Spirit. 17 And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; 18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself."  Living Bible

   For me and many others I have taught and counseled through the years, receiving the revelation of Christ in us as our Life, we experienced His love for us which opened us up to be able to receive the love of others.   I encourage you to make a copy of this prayer and pray it often.

                       

Live free in Christ,

  

Mark Maulding, Founder & President


www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding

Free to Love

   I do not remember my dad telling me he loved me until I was 19 years old. Even then, it was a response to me telling him first. Looking back, I believe he loved me and would have laid down his life for me. As we have both gotten older, he tells me often of his love for me. He was a loving father but it was not expressed clearly for many years.

   Our resurrection with Jesus has made us loving people by replacing our old nature with a new nature. Romans 6:3-4 tells us the old selfish nature has been crucified and buried with Christ being left in the grave. 1 Peter 1:3 describes it this way, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Do you see it? Jesus resurrection = our new birth (nature).

   This new nature is not an improved old nature. It is a nature which is like God because it is from God. 2 Peter 1:4 proves this where it says "For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust."

   God is love. It is His nature. Because our new nature is like God, it is a loving nature. Every person who is in Christ is a loving person. Loving others does not make us a loving person. We became a loving person the moment we placed our faith in Christ. Just to be clear, our new nature does NOT make us God. "As He is in the world, so are we."

   A lady politely argued with me about this at a recent F4T Conference. Though she knew many Scriptures about our identity in Christ, she still believed the lie, "What I do defines who I am" rather than the truth, "Our identity in Christ will determine what we do." Driving home from the conference one night, the Holy Spirit filled her with such an incredible awareness of the truth that she was overwhelmed to the point of sweet tears running down her face.

   We all need to ask the Holy Spirit to renew our minds with this reality. Because our new nature is like God's nature, we are loving people. That is why when God tells us in His Word to love one another and to love our enemies, He is not telling us to do something that is contrary to who we are. He is telling us to live like Him, the One who loves us and who loves His enemies enough to sacrifice His Son for their salvation. To love like Him is to live like who we already are in Christ. In fact, to love this way is our new normal so we need to ask the Holy Spirit in us to love through us.

   Our resurrection with Christ has freed us from sin as our master (Romans 6:6), freed us from the Law (Romans 7:4) so we are free to live with passion. We have the freedom to love because that is the deepest desire of who and what we are! We have been freed to love God, ourselves and others.

   A young married man recently shared with me that God had been speaking to him about this. He told him that as a son of God, he was already a loving husband and father. He is being so transformed that he says he and his wife have the closest relationship ever in their five year marriage! What is so remarkable about this is eight months ago, he was contemplating leaving his wife. That is the freedom to love!

   Whether you feel it or see it demonstrated in your life, would you stop right now and thank God that you are already a loving person in Christ? Then ask Him to remind you of this. Like the man above, you might be surprised at how this transforms not only you but your relationships.

Live Free In Christ, 

Mark Maulding, President and Founder 

www.GraceLifeInternational.com 

All Content Copyright © 2013 Mark Maulding