Draw It In, Give It Out

"And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5)

The human heart can love the human Jesus as it can love the human Lincoln, but the spiritual love of Jesus is something altogether different from the infinitely superior to the purest love the human heart can know.

Indeed it is not possible to love Jesus rightly except by the Holy Spirit. Only the Third Person of the Trinity can love the Second Person in a manner pleasing to the Father. The spiritual love of Jesus is nothing else but the Spirit in us loving Christ the Eternal Son.

Christ, after the flesh, receives a great deal of fawning attention, but love that is not the outflow of the indwelling Holy Spirit is not true spiritual love and cannot be acceptable to God. We do Christ no honor when we do no more than to give Him the best of our human love. He is not rightly loved until the Spirit within us does the loving.

We are not love, and we never expect to love by our own impulses. But Jesus is the heart of love. Jesus is love itself, and Jesus is ours. His love is ours. We draw it in and give it out.

~A. W. Tozer~

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Marks of Love

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity" (1 Corinthians 13:13)

While the all-important distinction between the human and the spiritual love of Jesus is one that must be discerned, and one which can scarcely be explained, yet we venture to point out some marks which may distinguish the two.

Reverence, for one thing, will always be present in the heart of the one who loves Christ in the Spirit. The Spirit gives a holy solemnity to every thought of Jesus, so that it is psychologically impossible to think of the true Christ with humor or levity. Neither can there be any unbecoming familiarity. The Person of Christ precludes all such.

Then, self-abasement is always found in the heart that loves Jesus with true spiritual love. When Paul saw Jesus, he fell on his face. John fell down as dead, and every soul that ever saw and felt the terror and wonder of His glorious Presence, has known some such experience of self-abasement.

It is most important that we know whether our relation to Jesus is divine or human. It will pay u to find out now.

Love is the loveliest thing in this world and the thing that speaks most for God in your life. Everybody can understand it.

~A. W. Tozer~