My beloved ones, will you choose to love like Jesus and sacrificially love others first! Will you follow My commands and love wildly, love fiercely, love first? Will you be the open handed love of God in fleshly form? Will you wear love and receive the stranger, host the foreigner?
This is your commission and one of your most important assignments to love Me the LORD your God with all of your heart, but to also love others fiercely.
I see the pain you’ve had to walk through and I have been with you as you wept and were rejected by those you loved. I have held your heart in times of trauma and I know the depth of the ask to love again, to open your heart to a broken world.
It’s time to love wildly again. Take courage and open your heart once more. Step into being a sign and a wonder to the world, modelling love in a time of fear. Be defiant in an anxious world, refusing to let crisis drive your response. Don’t close the doors to your heart or your home. Instead look to the unseen and be the Jesus your community so desperately needs. Love like Jesus – love first.
Activation:
Intentionally connect with someone you don’t know very well, to start to build community. Ask the Holy Spirit to highlight someone to you who He wants you to love well and ask Him how He wants you to do that. Love in the Kingdom is an active word, it is a way of doing life together and choosing someone else over our own needs to display Jesus to them.
As an added bonus, search the Bible for how many times the Word asks us to love one another. Loving others well is so deeply important to God.
We love, because [a]He first loved us.
1 John 4:19 (AMP)
Footnotes
[a] 1 John 4:19 Because God bestowed on humanity a free will, man is not forced to love Him, but rather consciously and freely chooses the response he makes to God’s love.
34 I am giving you a new commandment, that you [a]love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you too are to love one another.
35 By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you have love and unselfish concern for one another.”
John 13:34-35 (AMP)
Footnotes
[a] John 13:34 The key to understanding this and other statements about love is to know that this love (the Greek word agape) is not so much a matter of emotion as it is of doing things for the benefit of another person, that is, having an unselfish concern for another and a willingness to seek the best for another.
#lionbites
Unapologetically Marcia 