Living in God's love

A cool quote from Blue Like Jazz:

"Rick says that I will love God because He first loved me. I will obey God because I love God. But if I cannot accept God’s love, I cannot love Him in return, and I cannot obey Him. Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God’s love will. The ability to accept God’s unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God’s kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love."



I have been listening to worship music in the mornings recently and just having the sweetest times with God. I feel like I have been catching more glimpses of his beauty, and it is rocking me, making me feel like I am receiving his love and mercy again for the first time. Those glimpses feel like a spontaneous eruption in my soul of longing, awe, and love for Jesus that often will bring me to tears. In those moments, things like "dying to self" or "surrender" or "living for His glory over my own" are not hard, they are 100% natural, beautiful, and desirable, which is sadly all too foreign to me. Those glimpses literally make me want to either dance on top of a mountain and shout with joy with the people of God or get on my face crying before His glorious throne because of his mercy on me! Those glimpses make me authentically desire for nothing more than Him and for Him to get so much glory. My self falls away, and I just want Him. My desires fall away, and I just want Him. I cannot wait to worship in heaven with all of God's people in His presence. It is crazy that our bodies couldn't even handle that much glory, goodness, and joy right now. Imagaine that. We need new bodies to handle it.

Today, when I was having one of those moments, I was reminded of someone I know who cries every time she shares her testimony because of how much she knows she is loved. She came to know God in her later 20's through a family who loved her so unconditionally that it broke her. She was so powerfully transformed by God's grace, mercy, and goodness that just telling of it floods her heart with those emotions all over again. Even though I came to know Jesus at a young age and don't have an unusually crazy testimony where my life was just a royal mess (at least on the outside) and then I found Jesus, I feel like these glimpses of His beauty are making me feel like I just came to Him for the first time, and like I am experiencing exactly what my friend feels every time she shares her story or talks about God's mercy. I hope and pray to keep living in God's love, for as the quote above says, "if I cannot accept God’s love, I cannot love Him in return, and I cannot obey Him."

1 John 4:10: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.