“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction we are loved”.
The world has a view of love which is understood to be: an intense felling of deep affection or fondness for a person or thing. A great liking. This meaning is taken from the Latin and Greek words – eros and amore’. It is speaking essentially of a love of the worthy.
Love is also mentioned 735 times in the Bible. The word love in the bible has however a different definition. It is when someone is loved no matter what, even if totally unworthy!
1 John 3:16 explains love this way, “This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us”.
Look for yourself at Jesus as He loves the women who was sentenced to death for adultery (John 8:3-11), or the raising from the dead of the only son of a widow (Luke 7:11-15), of the acceptance of Zaccheus, the despised, thieving little man (Luke 19:2-10), or of the demon possessed, tormented man who lived in the cemetery, who Jesus loved and freed to live a new life (Mark 5:2).
Jesus is the same yesterday, and today and forever. How he loved then, is still how he loves now. It doesn’t matter if you think yourself invisible to everyone else, He still sees you. It doesn’t matter what you have or haven’t done; how successful you are or if you feel a complete failure. It matters not! Jesus loves you.
“Love was demonstrated to us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”.(Romans 5:8)
The world’s “love system” says you are lovable if you are worthy in some way, but if you are broken, ugly, or bitter and twisted; if you are unpopular or even invisible to others then who would bother loving you?
I say that the world’s love system is failing, it is messed up, and it is messing people up. Both the rich and the poor, the popular and the invisible. The successful and the not so successful. The world’s love is not enough. It is second best and flawed and unable to make us whole.
But God’s “love system” is fully intact and transforming. If we believe that, or we desperately want that type of love, we have a decision to make. Which love will we seek after and earnestly long to know with all our hearts?
Jesus says you can know His kind of love. He says “You will find me if you seek me, when you search for me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13). Plus when you receive the love He has to offer you , you understand what real love is and it becomes far easier to be love others, as He sheds His love abroad in our hearts. (Romans 5:5)
Today may you seek to know and live in this love; and in knowing will you have the power to understand how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)
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