It’s our joy to greet you again as we walk together into 2016, the year of Redemptive Love. The Holy Spirit is seeking to have greater intimacy with us. He is seeking a place to dwell, abide, and to make His permanent home in our hearts! We need to be rooted in this love and founded securely upon it. These are dark and trying times and it can be hard for us in this anxious, fearful age to quiet our souls. We must make it our priority to spend time alone with the Lord. So many things pull and distract us from this our highest calling, but we must speak to our soul and tell it to be still and fear not, but to praise His Holy Name! How I love Paul’s prayer, that we might receive power and be strong to apprehend and grasp with all the saints, the experience of that Love! How Great is Your Love oh Lord! That more than ever we would come to know the Love of God in such a way that wherever we go that Love would just be pouring out of our pores bringing hope to the hopeless, grace and redemptive mercy to the lost of this world.
It is not enough just to “know” about this love, we need to “know” Him! It is not enough to hear your pastor minister about his own experience with this love, we must experience it for ourselves! Love surpasses knowledge! We cannot share a love that we do not know! Is this not our goal, to be rooted deeply in that love to grasp the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love, and to know for ourselves the deep, personal love of Christ? Can any goal be more wonderful? It is life transforming power that comes from spending time in His Holy Presence. I am believing that the Body of Christ will be so full of the Love of God that wherever they go, people will be convicted of their sins and be saved. Just as the apostles, I believe that by our shadows the sick will receive healing because we are wholly filled and flooded with God Himself!
We don’t need a pulpit or a platform to minister to the lost and needy, we just need to be so totally devoted to Him, making Him our number one priority. Seek Ye first His Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you! Family have you noticed that this isn’t about you or me? We have been given the greatest privilege that any one can have. We can freely enter into the Holy Throne of Grace to gaze upon His beauty and to inquire in His temple. This is the upward call of Christ Jesus to leave the outer informational outer realm and actually find ourselves in the living Presence of the Lord Himself! The journey leads us into place of surrender where we listen and hear His voice and from listening, ascend into His love. We are living in days where the intimacy of Christ will be restored to its highest level since the first century. He invites each of His precious ones to come into this place and be baptized in His Love.
Lord, is this possible? Is it true that I might know the love of God that surpasses all knowledge? O God, I seek to know You, to live in the the substance of Your Love. For Your Love is the shelter of my protection. Help me Jesus to recognize Your Love, not as a divine emotion, but as Your very substance! Help me to see that it was neither Pilate nor Satan that put You on the cross; It was love alone to which You succumbed. Remind me again that it is Your Love that still intercedes for me even now. Amen.
