God is so GOOD!

I like to think that God has given me a gift in putting what HE places in my heart into words. I praise Him daily for this and I pray He never abandons me in this area. I pray I have more time to put his words to my heart to paper. Thank you Jesus!

While driving back and forth from Amarillo, I do that a great deal now days, God and I have some interesting talks. At this particular time I had been struggling with holiness and righteousness and how I should live and how was I to reach others with these two ways of living and the amazing God I serve showed me that you cannot have holiness and righteousness without love. He showed me that these three ways of living are like the Trinity. We as the children of God have to first know what love is and feel that love before we can live righteous and holy. We as the children of God have to show and extend our love before we can teach others about righteousness and holiness. The greatest gift I feel we can give is love. Why would there be so many songs about it, so many cards about it, and so many heart issues about it. Love is what saved us from sin, love sacrificed Himself for us, and love welcomes us with open arms. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 about love, teaching that without love you have nothing, it is the greatest gift;

1 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages] and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.] All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

While I was pondering on this I thought what is love to me? Many thoughts ran through my head, like how I feel loved when my husband smiles at me, a simple smile from him speaks love to my heart like no other. The love that I felt when each of my children were born and I saw them for the first time. The love I know my parents have had for me even when I didn’t realize it until I had my own children. But what stuck out the most to me was God reminding me how my little 4’10” grandma acts when we show up to her house. No matter how late it is or when we show up she is always standing at the front door waiting to greet us with her little feet running in place because she is so excited she can’t move and the tears of joy running down her cheeks. She always says, “How’s my sugar lump?” And then she squeezes the snot out of everyone one of us, even my 6’3” father! I feel that is how Jesus is going to be when He sees us in Heaven for the first time.
It states in Genesis 1:26 that God made us in His image. I know God loves us more than I could ever fathom, so if He made us in His image, we too are to love others like He loves. We are to reach out to the hurting and pray with them, we are to greet strangers with a smile and a hug, we are to stop and dry the tears of the hurting, and we are to stop and feed the hungry and clothe the poor. We cannot reach the unsaved souls in this world by just walking by and turning our noses up at them. We have to show love, even though sometimes we don’t feel like it. I’m guessing Jesus didn’t feel like being sacrificed on a cross, but HE LOVED US enough to do so.
I never had the reputation for being the most friendliest or bubbliest. But, I see in myself that the more I grow closer to God and the more I feel His love for me, I have an unexplained joy and yearning inside my heart to reach those that are hurting, to just plain hug someone and give them a compliment, to extend my hand to the them for prayer or to wipe their tears, to just show love. The more I show His love the more is it addicting, I want to show His love to everyone. I believe that if we never reach the lost souls with love, we can never lead them and teach them how to live a life of holiness and righteousness that is full of faith and hope. People will never feel welcome and have the ability to receive in a place of feeling unwanted and unloved. Lost souls will be lost forever if we, as a church do not learn to love. WE would be lost forever if God did not love us so much that HE sent His one and only son to die for us. God’s love has saved us from an eternity from hell, saved us from bondage and has given us freedom. GOD LOVES YOU and we should take that love and show it to others. After all, we are made in HIS image and I feel that when we learn to love ourselves and love God for all He has done for us then following that amazing path of holiness and righteousness is easier to follow.