Love causes change!
And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you: To the end he may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father. 1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
Love always have certain hopes and intentions and wishes for Loved. Love desires that the loved one must flourish and blossom and realize all their potential and be filled with virtue and moral beauty. Love desires “that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe….”
This means sometimes love needs to do that which will cause pain for the loved one. Love is often confused with softness. To say Jesus loves people is not to say he’ll always do what they want him to do. “If Christ had practiced the kind of love we advocate nowadays, he would have lived to a ripe old age.” Sometimes authentic love “will unnerve, offend, disturb, or even hurt those who are being loved.” Being for someone is deeper than just wanting to spare them pain. If I am really for a person, I am willing to risk saying painful things, if pain is the only way to bring growth. “For the Lord disciplines those whom he loves.” True love is ready to warn, reprove, confront, or admonish when necessary. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her so as “to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind —yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish.” God’s plan is not just for a fifty-percent blemish reduction. Love longs for us to enter into the splendor God intended— no spots, no wrinkles, no blemishes. The process is almost never pain-free.
God’s love moves him to bear infinitely more pain for our sakes than we ever could: “and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” God is for you. He celebrates your victories and mourns your setbacks. People generally don’t want their enemies to succeed. More humbling is the fact that deep down we often don’t even want our friends to succeed too much. This is the truth that staggered the apostle Paul: for all his raggedness,God was for him: “If God is for us, who is against us?… Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” To say that God loves us, then, means that God is for us. God longs for us to blossom and flourish beyond our own longings for ourselves. HALLELUJAH 🙌
YOURS IN CHRIST,
APOSTLE ASHOK MARTIN