[Tulips, 2010, JAVanDevender]
Joel 2:12-13 " Now, therefore," says the LORD, "Turn to Me with all your heart, With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning." So rend your heart, and not your garments; Return to the LORD your God, For He is gracious and merciful, Slow to anger, and of great kindness; And He relents from doing harm.
I sometimes wonder if we fallen human beings really know what it means to love someone.... even ourselves... with all our heart.
God calls us to such a complete immersion in Himself, such a complete giving over to Him of our entire being, that I often think that we really don't know what it means because it is something so outside our own experience. We live in a world of emotions and, in this particular cultural era, a preoccupation with them. In the pendulum swings that is human history, today we think of "to know" in terms of "to feel." How sad it may be then if by this definition we are cut off from "knowing love' because we have never truly "felt love."
Taking a step into the minefield of offering definitions, I would posit that "love" is not so much responsive affections, as in a warm, outgoing "feeling" as it is a "desire" properly limited. In this case, "to love" in my thinking is to be moved by the strongest kind of "desire" for the well being of the other person, or the object of love. To love someone is to desire their good. The more intense the "love" the more intense that "desire." To love God is to desire His glory... His honor... His delight. To love Him with all our heart is to desire that glory... that honor... that delight above all other things.
Necessarily "love" as "desire for an other's well being" is self-denying. If we love someone with all our heart then there is no room left over for loving ourselves in a manner that might diminish the other person's well being. Is this not how God loved us? Is this not the manner in which Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, loved His Father in Heaven and us, His brothers and sisters? Jesus' love for us is rooted in His love for His Father. His Father is glorified in the bringing of many sons and daughters into His Kingdom. His Father is delighted when a life is transformed from the worship of sin to the worship of righteousness. His Father is honored when a person's speech is transformed from God slandering to God honoring. At every point we can see that Jesus' love for the Father is the causal basis on which He does the work of transforming our lives.
But we also are loved at the same time. Because all of those things which bring glory and honor and praise to God in us are also things which rebound to our delight, to our glory and, with caution, to our honor. And this is what brings me back to my opening concern... about fallen man not knowing what it means to love.
Jesus' love for God which then is expressed in love for us, is what teaches us... opens us up to the whole reality of love as it really exists. We love because God first loves us... apart from that "experience" or "knowledge" communicated to us... all of our "loving" is so weak and slimy that for all practical purposes it doesn't even deserve the appellation. Yet... yet! ... God having loved us transforms us in such a way that love is not only possible to us but inevitable. His love awakens love. And though, in our fallen state, we cannot persist in loving with all our hearts without interruption, yet in our life we can, episodically, actually do so. There can be moments and more than moments when we are completely given over to our Savior and to our God and with weeping eyes and joyful hearts, we focus on Him and desire only Him and only His glory.
Like flowers bursting forth from the near frozen earth, the beauty of love blossoms and turns to the sun (Son), adding its glory to the Garden of creation... to the delight of Him who created that Garden for this very purpose.
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