Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
We do not just need to know God loves us; we also need the purposes of His love to be satisfied within us. His love must find complete purchase in our souls if we are to be transformed by it, and that transformation is the very substance of our ongoing Christian life. Today the church does a passable job of communicating the message that our Creator loves us unconditionally. What is sometimes harder to discern from pulpits is that the love of Christ must be progressively actualized in our hearts. It must penetrate to our very core and have its way.
We in the Western church seem to know all there is to know about the mechanics of conversion. Evangelistic efforts never seem to be in short supply. Where we fall short is in getting past the honeymoon period of our rebirth and onto the deeper paths of sanctification. Spiritual milk remains the primary staple in some Evangelical congregations today. The meat is too often missing for those who need to move beyond the basics of conversion.
Sanctification is, at its core, the progressive appropriation of God’s love in our lives. His love must enter into the dark and secret places of our souls and take possession of those places. Then we will become what being the object of our Lord’s passion is designed to make us become: beings both filled with, and consumed by, divine love. This is the one of the primary goals of the Savior of our souls, to re-create us as vessels of His great affection.
This “vessel” analogy often puts sensitive people off. Perhaps it is because they identify a vessel as simply a tool, something that never benefits itself from the love coursing through it. But we are destined to be more than vessels. Becoming a conduit of God’s love can only happen if we first receive that divine affection into the very core of who we are and are healed. We must receive before we can give and for that reason I believe the receiving is just as important in God’s economy as the giving. One enables the other.
Jesus Christ is the Lover of our souls. He wants us to be fruitful, yes, but He also wants us both healed and joined with Him in the greatest love affair the universe has ever known. The fruitfulness of our Christian lives will naturally flow from that primary union between His heart and ours.
True love must be satisfied and the satisfaction in question is ultimately all encompassing. The God Scripture tells us is love will not be satisfied until we are completely His, until we know the glory that is the result of being fully possessed by the greatest Lover in the Universe. It is not enough to know He loves us. The knowledge that He loves us must give way to the actual experience of being loved by Him, and we must let Him have His way with us to the deepest level of union possible in this world. That is our first, best destiny as the beloved of God on Earth and it is our eternal destiny when our time on earth is through.
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