Love and Response

Two words for you today. Love and response.  This is what I am learning.  God's love for us is the most important thing in our life. We have to receive LOVE, because there IS nothing else without it.  I. am. loved.  Do you believe it in your heart of hearts? Or are you like me and know God loves you, but struggle to believe that you are loved as His beloved, the object of His relentless, pursuing love?  We are made for love. It isn't a man-made desire, and if we do not live in the reality that we are loved, NOTHING else in life is as it should be.  But how do we receive His love?  Why do we fight God on this? Thinking He can't love us like that?  He is after your heart!  I have thought that it was up to me to love and receive God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I have tried, and guess what?  I fall short. I can't love like that.  But here is where it gets interesting.  You know that verse, "For apart from me you can do nothing"(John 15:5)?  I cannot love God in my own power. Or receive His love.  It is impossible.  We can't respond to Him with love until we receive His reckless love.  Even as He lovingly commands me to love Him with all my heart, soul, and mind, He is the one enabling me to love Him like that. Enabling me to respond to His love. To receive His love.   

He enables me to receive, accept, and return His love. 

To me, that is profound.  He is the one to do it. Not me.  Ask God to reveal to you who He is, that you would fall in love with Him as you get to know who He really is, and that He would enable you to accept, receive, and return His love.  It is life-changing, friends.

beginnings

This is a new season. A season of change and growth, stumbling and grumbling.  Hopefully, as time goes on, much more of the former.  Whether this is read by everyone or no one, it is a place to look back on the happenings of life and see the hand of God at work within this stubborn heart, desperately in need of grace.  So welcome, friends, grab a cup of your favorite brew, and find a piece of your own story in this girl's current musings.  And with that, I will leave you with my favorite song at the moment(by Rend Collective Experiment), and the prayer of my heart:    

Come set Your rule and reign
In our hearts again
Increase in us we pray
Unveil why we're made
Come set our hearts ablaze with hope
Like wildfire in our very souls
Holy Spirit come invade us now
We are Your Church
We need Your power
In us

We seek Your kingdom first
We hunger and we thirst
Refuse to waste our lives
For You're our joy and prize
To see the captive hearts released
The hurt; the sick; the poor at peace
We lay down our lives for Heaven's cause
We are Your church
We pray revive
This Earth

Build Your kingdom here
Let the darkness fear
Show Your mighty hand
Heal our streets and land
Set Your church on fire
Win this nation back
Change the atmosphere
Build Your kingdom here
We pray

Unleash Your kingdom's power
Reaching the near and far
No force of hell can stop
Your beauty changing hearts
You made us for much more than this
Awake the kingdom seed in us
Fill us with the strength and love of Christ
We are Your church
We are the hope
On Earth