Truth Streams – GrahamCooke.Com
This guest post comes to us from Graham Cooke at Graham Cooke Ministries.
In God’s DNA is Love
Graham Cooke
Our job as Christians is to represent God’s glory to the world. It is our privilege to receive God, in all His fullness, and demonstrate His loving kindness to those around us. “[Jesus] is the radiance of [God’s] glory and the exact representation of His nature,” Hebrews 1:3 teaches us. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father,” Jesus Himself added in John 14:9.
As Christ is formed in us, we take on God’s personality. Jesus’ two great statements—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”—are not just commandments. They are also promises of how God loves us. He intends to love us, for the rest of our lives, with all of His heart, mind, soul, and strength. He has also guaranteed that we will have the capacity to return that type of love to Him. When God loves us with all of His heart, we can love Him with all of ours. When God loves us with all of His mind, we can love Him with all of ours.
This kind of love changes us. I thoroughly enjoy loving God with my mind, sitting down and thinking about Him. I spend four months a year meditating on Him. I have a small room where I go and think. There are days when I won’t leave that room. Meditation is nothing more than thinking deeply about something. When I sit down and think about who God is and what He is like, He cannot resist coming and speaking out what He, in turn, thinks about me. God loves us with all of His mind. His every thought about us is good and pure.
In 1 John 4:16, we read of what this love can do to us—“We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” God loved us so much that He gave us His Son to save us, and then gave us the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide us as we learn to abide in Him.
The natural outflow of loving God with everything in us is to love others as well. God’s generosity to us must overflow into love for the rest of the world. We can love others because we are outrageously loved. When we truly love God with all of our body, mind, soul, and strength, a breakthrough occurs in our perception, emotion and thinking.
The bigger the failure we have been, the more dynamic our shift into living in the love of God. The Father looks at us and is filled with love. What weaknesses we have become the catalyst for Him to give us what we need to overcome them. “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,” as 1 Corinthians 1:27 says. God says, “I know what’s missing in you, and I have a gift to make it whole.”
It is urgent that Christians receive and experience a revelation of how much the Lord loves us. That love didn’t crescendo at the point of salvation; that was only a step in a long journey of deep love and affection. His radical love covers a multitude of sins. Everything in our lives that doesn’t work is covered by His love. The Holy Spirit takes these things and reveals them to us. He shows us the areas where we need the love of God to flow next. He loves leading us to truth and expressing Christ in us.
The love of God for each of us is so deep that it absorbs failure, it covers sin, it overcomes weaknesses, and it gives us astonishing acceptance in the ranks of the beloved. We are so powerfully loved that we cannot avoid His joyful acceptance and confidence in us. His personality is so strong that nothing is impossible—we can even love our enemies.
“Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven,” says Matthew 5:16. When His nature lives in us, we can enjoy and share the wonder of that experience, and His glory will shine into our personality.
Let me make this as clear as possible: the only evidence that God’s DNA is in us is how we love ourselves and how we love other people.
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