Faith in its infancy is always taking. It’s center of thought and being is self and all that self needs to thrive. It’s main focus is on how much God loves me. This is a necessary and good stage but one that God longs for every believer to leave behind in order to take possession of a higher love. The lofty place or room, so to speak, where all I know is how much I love God. In order to enter into this knowledge the former must first be known, that God LOVES me.
If someone has truly come in through the Gate, the love of God for the believer has flooded his heart, the Holy Spirit bearing witness to this truth. This believer will rapidly begin to discern that there is something yet higher than knowing God’s love for me. And that is that I LOVE GOD!!!!! Remember that we love God because He first loved us.
This is pictured so well in Song of Songs. The bride is seen upon her bed, all snuggled in for the evening, basking in her new found romance with the Lover of her soul. She KNOWS that God really loves her. She is beside herself with deep joys. Yet strangely, when her very Beloved comes to her door to call her out, she doesn’t want to get up. She is comfortable and even lazy, having been lavished with the love of her Beloved, God Himself. She says that she has already taken off her robe and gotten settled, why does He want her to rise up? There is a closed door between them still. He is trying to open it but she must come to turn the knob.
Then, something in her heart realizes that there is something better than reclining in the glory of His love. She jumps up and runs to the door to get to Him…but alas, He has departed. He removed Himself from her for a moment to force her growth into a mature, consummated relationship with her Beloved.
She now will go through whatever it takes to get to Him. She is in the darkness of night searching, beaten by the guards (killing the flesh in her) but she takes no notice of it.
All she knows now is that she is consumed by the love in HER heart FOR God.
Jesus said it is more blessed to give than to receive. And it is indeed. It is also more blessed to love than to be loved. This is what God wants us to learn.
Let’s look again at Song of Songs. We can see a truth that is incomprehensible to us unless we have entered into the higher love that is God centered and not me centered… that is knowing that I LOVE GOD now instead of just focusing on the fact that He loves me.
It is God Himself pictured here in the Beloved who asks the Bride to turn her eyes from Him because He cannot bear her beauty anymore. He cannot bear her beauty anymore because she has become JUST like Him! She is all lovely and all beauty exactly like her Husband, Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom. She no longer takes and takes and takes satisfying the insatiable longing to be filled up with the love of God. She is filled to overflowing and perpetually overflowing. She now only gives. Just like Him!!!!
This is a sweetness that only God knows. He would rather love than to receive it. This is seen in the atonement. The beauty is this: once a believer has risen to this love, he now loves others whether they love him or not (love your enemy). And it is most glorious to do it. This love isn’t dependent upon how others treat me or how they behave or anything. This love is God’s love pouring through me.
So truly this is the perfecting of the believer ( “Leaving the elementary things of Christ behind now and moving on to perfection…that is, Christ likeness”), and Jesus said it so concisely, which is always His way. That is that I now DO love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my mind (that is, body, soul and spirit because we are also a trinity, made in His image), AND I am now able to love my neighbor as myself.
Thank You Lord,
Be blessed today,
Cheryl