For so much of my life, I focused on how I could love God better and what I could do to show Him how much I loved Him. Now my focus has changed to receiving His love for me, imperfect Sandra McCollom. What has been the result? Choosing to boast about His love for me instead of my love for Him has caused me to fall more deeply in love with God than ever before! As 1 John 4:19 says, “We love him, because he first loved us” (KJV).
This understanding of how love works — that it all originates with God — has transformed my relationships with other people as well as my relationship with God.
Consider the instruction we read in 1 John 4:7: “Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.”
God is love! And as His children, we are filled with His love in order to share it with others.
Now let’s look at the next verse: “He who does not love has not become acquainted with God [does not and never did know Him], for God is love” (1 John 4:8, AMP).
Maybe in the past you read this scripture and thought, as I did, Well, according to this verse, if I don’t love, I do not know God. Man, I keep trying to walk in love, but I fail every day. I’ve got to try harder. Maybe I should listen to a podcast on love. I need to find a method to help me love better.
But if we read this verse instead through the lens of grace, we can reflect: If I just get up every day and let God love me, I meditate on His love, and make sure I am listening to teaching that is full of the good news of the gospel of grace, I am going to love other people. All I need to do is keep receiving His love, even when I am imperfect. If I am filled with God’s love towards me even when I blow it, then I won’t live under guilt and condemnation. Instead I will, as a result of receiving God’s unconditional love for me, “be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God” (Ephesians 3:19).
Notice, I did not say “I might love other people” but that “I am going to love other people.” If we are truly receiving God’s unconditional love for ourselves, it is a given that His love will flow right out of us to others. The apostle Paul described how this cycle of overflowing looked in the lives of the believers in Thessalonica: “You need to know, friends, that thanking God over and over for you is not only a pleasure: it’s a must. We have to do it. Your faith is growing phenomenally; your love for each other is developing wonderfully” (2 Thessalonians 1:3, MSG).
As I learn to live more fully in God’s grace for my own life, I find myself being more gracious toward others. My husband and kids have noticed the change since I’ve come out from under the weight and pressure of trying to live under the law and learned to relax and grace.
Watch Sandra McCollom this Thursday on LIFE TODAY. Sandra McCollom. Copyright ©2015 by Sandra McCollom. Excerpted from I Tried Until I Almost Died by permission of WaterBrook Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
