Exhibiting the Love of God

I know how challenging it can be in our daily lives to develop and show the “love” of God for those that in our charge. I had little personal experience with the day to day responsibility of showing God’s love in my home since I lived alone and I never really had a significant demand placed on me on a personal basis. When Abde my youngest came to live with me, I thought that God had made a mistake, the difficulties and challenges were formidable. The call by the Spirit of the Lord to maintain my love and caring for him, despite his actions, was so apparent. I later related this experience to Hosea’s call and realized that this was a work of God in progress.

Coming to Jamaica dramatically changed this situation and over the last seven years the Spirit of God had been at work to demonstrate to me what it means to walk in daily love for those that are closest to me. Like Hosea, there has been a real life experience at work to demonstrate how God has loved me and loved you in spite of our faults and failings. It has been so aptly demonstrated with my youngest boy who just seems to not make the right decisions, always choosing to do what he should not and then my having to deal with the situations that arise with him.

Life and Authority
God has provided His direction to us, as I provide direction to my youngest boy, yet even though I provide direction he seems to conveniently follow his own. Getting into trouble with me and others and causing me to wonder if he really has subscribed to my authority in his life.

Some questions that arise in my mind follow as I have conversation with the Spirit of Christ:

Do I give up on him? Did God give up on me?
Do I continue to direct him? Did God stop leading me?
Do I keep loving him and having relationship with him? Did God ever stop loving me?
Should I be angry with him? Has God dealt with me in anger?

The list of these juxtapositions can go on indefinitely. But the sense that I get from the Lord is that we must learn and develop His attitude toward those around us and closest to us.

We know that they fail, we know that they misuse us, we know that they don’t listen to our instruction and follow them … but I wonder how we truly follow Christ in our own life and how many times we have been found wanting ourselves in our relationship with Him.

I found this Audio Book online that I have been taking the time to listen to, it was originally written by Andrew Murray in the late 1800’s but is so relevant to this issue. If you have access to the text that would be good but I am providing the link to the MP3 files for the audio. You can download the chapters individually or download the whole book at the bottom of the list as a zipped file that you will then unzip.

Please take the time over the next few days or weeks to use this in your devotional time and give me some feedback about your experience after hearing God’s heart through Brother Murray’s book.

Link: http://www.freechristianaudiobooks.com/audiobooks/AbsoluteSurrender/mp3/Surrendermp3.htm