Love is...

Love is the
active desire for the
well-being and joy
of others.

"Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth."

- 1 John 3:18 ESV

It's Spring!

Spring is here, and gloriously so. I haven't experienced spring in four years and am truly loving every bit of it. The sunshine, the birds singing, the spring flowers - but there are still all these crusty old piles of half-melted snow lying around looking like they ought to be done away with.

I was thinking about it the other day and realized that this is kind of like my life. God has awakened my soul and there is life. Christ lives in me - to think! There are rays of light and grace shining and warming my soul but there are these crusty old sin-habits lying around, looking uglier as time goes by. Oh for more light and heat to melt them! I wanted to do away with those crusty snow heaps and by God's grace I want to do away with my crusty old will and sit in the light of His love till there are fewer and fewer piles of slush, and more and more snowdrops in my soul.

"And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." - 2 Cor. 3:18 ESV

"Herein is Love" - Thoughts from Spurgeon

The other day I borrowed Humility and How to Get It - by Charles Spurgeon from our church library. (Humility is something I dearly need more of.) The book is a collection of Spurgeon's sermons, many on humility. The first sermon, however, is on love. I appreciated one of Spurgeon's colorful illustrations:

I am looking for "the springs of the sea," and you point me to a little pool amid the rocks which has been filled by the flowing tide. I am glad to see that pool: how bright! how blue! how like the sea from whence it came! But do not point to this as the source of the great waterfloods; for if you do I shall smile at your childish ignorance, and point you to yon great rolling main which tosses its waves on high. What is your little pool to the vast Atlantic? Do you point me to the love in the believer's heart, and say, "Herein is love!" You make me smile. I know that there is love in that true heart; but who can mention it in the presence of the great rolling ocean of the love of God, without bottom and without shore? The word not is not only upon my lip but in my heart as I think of the two things, "NOT that we loved God, but that God loved us." What poor love ours is at its very best when compared with the love wherewith God loves us!...I do rejoice in the love of saints to their Lord. Yet this is but a streamlet; the unfathomable deep, the eternal souce from which all love proceeds, infinitely exceeds all human affection, and it is found in God, and in God alone.

"In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

- 1 John 4:10 ESV