This morning I have been thinking about something I am calling, "the will to love". The thought is this. God created humanity with the unique gift and responsibility of free will. Equipped with this, mankind was and is placed in the midst of choices, Eden being an example of this with a thousand blessed and wonderful options, a single forbidden one, and a devil to tempt and test mankind's will. In the midst of a million choices, what will we will to choose? Will we will to love and serve God, or to love and serve ourselves?
If we are looking for an example to follow we do not need to look further than to the life of Christ. No one demonstrated more clearly the decision to determine to love the Father than Jesus did, and nowwhere in His life is this more observable than during the hours of His passion. While locked in that quintessential battle with the forces of hell, He resigned Himself completely to the absolute will of His Father. Here we see Jesus' will at work, willing Himself with drops of blood to love His Father, even while knowing that soon His Father would, for the sake of humanity, turn His back on him and crush him, because "he who knew no sin, became sin for us.", becoming a curse for us. John 8:29 records Jesus' words and will when, at an earlier time he said, "The One who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because (don't miss that word for it ties two things together - the presence of God and the determination to do His will. ) I always do what pleases Him." (emphasis added).
The bottomline is this, there simply is no other test of Biblical love than to see what we are determined to do in the midst of a thousand idols, and in the pitch of our own daily battles with our own still "all too alive" sin natures. Will I will to love/serve God and others? Will I turn away from all other gods because I have decided that, with the eternal and inestimable gift of my God-given will, I will worship God alone? In a land where the horizon now displays the hard-edged and grotesque outlines of cultural idols as large as skyscapers, or as tiny as the chip inside this week's most captivating trinket of technologies; where our hearts now hide the lust for soft and sultry appearence of skin deep beauty that lures its' victims into beds of wanton and insatiable need for the pills and shots and creams, once labeled what they are,"Snake-Oil", that now promise for a price to hold at bay keep on the other side of the mirror, the inevitable demons of wrinkles and age, whom will I will to serve?
Is not this the greatest test of love? Was it only to former Hebrew slaves beginning their journey to a new land of promise, that God said: "Thou shalt have no other gods, before Me." "Thou shalt not bow down to any graven images."
The proof that it is the greatest test of love is that the One who prosesses the greatest love, God, willed Himself, to give Himself, to and for us, to redeem us. This willingness of God, to give all, to die, may be a price Satan bargined that the Almighty would never be able to pay. Since God is spirit, and man is flesh and blood, perhaps Satan posited, that even if God was willing, he could not save the creature He so loves. Who better than Satan knew that though man the creature could die, could be deceived, God the Creator can not, so the two can never be reconciled. "Anyway", Lucifier, chief of all the fallen angels, may have thought, "this man thing, its' just another creature, and it will be little more than collateral damage in my quest to reign over the planet where I and a third of heaven's spirit warriors, have been exiled to!" But, it seems, Satan greatly underestimated God and His love for us. Because in His foreknowledge God had already seen the whole fall played out, and before the foundations of the earth were laid He set that redemptive, saving love in motion. As the old chorus goes: "Oh how we loves you and me. He gave His life, what more could He give? Oh, how He loves you. Oh, how He loves me. Oh, how He loves you and me."
When Christ was born, the whole plan of redemption, which God had long been keeping sealed up in the scroll of redemption, (see Rev 5:1), was made known, and you can bet that all hell trembled and shook at the angellic announcement of Christ's birth, that through Jesus, this babe born in a manger, God's good will to come to men. Extraordinary! While all the other religions and faith expression of the world explain what we must to do get to God, Christianity proclaims the message that God has come to us.
So, in light of this, isn't it right to ask ourselves what are we doing with our wills? Have we truly come to that place where we are, as an act of our wills, offering ourselves completely to God? I am willing, have I set my will to love and serve God by loving and serving my neighbor, and do I do these things because I love God? Have I determined to lay down my life for others? Am I willing myself to love because God willed Himself to love me? "Behold, what manner of love the Father has given unto us..." Am I willing to love?
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