1John 4:16(NLT) states, “We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” Our Heavenly Father is love. He is the definitive authority on love because love is who He is. You and I didn’t create love, and we are not in a position to define what it is. We can’t determine how love operates, or what it produces. God has done this. He is love, and everything that exists was created by Him to serve the purpose of His love. To see the effects of what happens when people do not live by God’s love, we only need to look at everything around us. Humanity’s failure to let God’s love rule has impacted every corner of human existence. Nature, commerce, agencies, businesses, and all the institutions that make our lives work—corruption and confusion is apparent in them all.  This isn’t what God wants. Through Jesus Christ, He has empowered us to make a difference. He has given us a better and more abundant way to live, and it will require us to release our old way of thinking, so that our minds are renewed to a new way of being.

All of us have something in common. We all desperately want to be loved. This desire drives us every moment of every day. It motivates us to get out of bed each morning. Where does this desire come from? It comes from the Father. He created us in such a way that we will desire the thing from which we are made. Deep in our souls, we recognize this. It’s our soul’s cry.

Life can be a very miserable reality without the nourishment it needs. God designed life to continually expand and increase, always expressing itself through love, because only through love can the increase and expansion of life truly be achieved. It stands to reason then, that if we are not nourishing life with what it requires, our souls will be malnourished, and we are more apt to feed them the equivalent of junk food. Thus, the negative cycle begins of never having enough of the right nourishment and having too much of that which causes us to be depleted and ill.

The Beginning of everything is God. He is Alpha and Omega, and from the very beginning, He has demonstrated very clearly that through love, partnership is established. Partnership is extremely important to Heavenly Father. He partnered with His Word to create all that exists, and He partnered with His Spirit to put life and power into everything that He and His Word created.

Through the first couple, Adam and Eve, God provided us a blueprint of His original intention for how love should operate and how He will cooperate with humans. It is through partnership. He gave the first couple purpose and occupation first, and it should come as no surprise to us that He then commanded them to pursue the business of expansion and increase. Genesis 1:2 tells us that He blessed the first couple and then said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and then govern it.” He commanded that humans are to govern and manage the earth. This has not changed, nor will it; for God never oversteps His Word.

God gave Adam and Eve free-will. They could choose to live life however they wanted, and they ultimately decided they wanted autonomy from God. They no longer wanted to be under His sovereignty. Listening to the devil, the father of lies, they started to doubt the truth God had taught them. Because of this, the love partnership they had with God was severed. Heavenly Father never stopped loving them, but their distrust and doubt was proof that they had stopped loving Heavenly Father.

John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His one and only begotten Son so that no one would need to be destroyed but could receive the gift of eternal life. God provided us a Way to reject the action of Adam and Eve by believing in the one God sent, Jesus Christ. The Son came to put things right between us and Heavenly Father, to restore the connection that was lost by Adam and Eve. Now, anyone that trusts in Jesus Christ is acquitted of all charges. Since Jesus Christ has restored our connection to Heavenly Father, love can flow freely from God to us.

The acceptance of Jesus Christ means that through him we have allowed God’s love to enter our hearts. As we trust Jesus more and more, we become spiritually strong. Ephesians 3:17(NLT) states, “Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.” This is the beginning of our new life, and we must from this point spiritually mature through our understanding of Christ. 2Corinthians 5:17 affirms that we have become new creations by accepting him as Lord, but our minds and hearts must change so they are in harmony with our new reality in Christ. Our minds still have the same thoughts and our hearts still have many of the same feelings as before we became new in Christ. The walls we built up around our hearts and minds as protective shields must come down.

Why do the walls have to come down? The answer is because, before the love of Christ came into them, we built the walls around our hearts and minds from arrogance and fear. These are the building material of doubt, and we cannot fully trust God through Jesus Christ with these heavies of darkness still in our hearts and minds. As we learn about Jesus Christ, and our trust in God’s love increases, we gradually let down these walls of arrogance and fear, and the Holy Spirit that dwells within helps us to do this.

2Thessalonians 3:5(NLT) states, “May the Lord lead your hearts into a full understanding and expression of the love of God and the patient endurance that comes from Christ.” This must be our constant prayer. We need a full understanding of the love of God, and it will require the practice of patient endurance to fully comprehend what the Lord desires to teach us. There are many that are desperate to be loved and because of this desperation, they have received much heartache, devastation, and pain.

We were arrogant in our attempts to impress upon another person our definition of love. We also sought to compel them to accept it as nourishment to feed their own hunger for it. We didn’t have a clue. Our definition of love was flawed and therefore, so was what we gave to others. It was not the love of God through Christ, because we had not accepted it into our hearts.

Quality in and quality out is one of life’s most practical equations. Jesus Christ said in John 14:6(NLT), “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” The very foundation of our personhood must be built and grounded in God’s love through Jesus Christ. This is quality! And we’ve been given access! God is the Source of love and it flows from Him, through Jesus Christ to us, and then it flows from us to others. The cycle is completed as all of us give this love back to God through our faith and trust in Him. This completes the cycle of love and everything God has created rests upon it. It is the Way He has given us to live not just abundantly, but more than abundantly through Christ.

Jesus Christ is the Way! Because of what God accomplished through him, we have received new life. Romans 5:18(NLT) states, “Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone.” The one act of Adam exposed the whole human race to condemnation, and the one act of Christ’s perfect righteousness reconciled us back to God. Now we are conduits of God’s love, and ambassadors of Christ. We can give from the quality love we have received. On this truth, we must build our confidence to freely love others.

God commands us not to go back to that cursed way of living, where we didn’t know a thing about real and true love. Romans 6:13(NLT) says, “Do not let any part of your body become an instrument of evil to serve sin. Instead, give yourselves completely to God, for you were dead, but now you have new life. So use your whole body as an instrument to do what is right for the glory of God.”

Through Christ, we have this new life of love. We should not allow any part of our new reality in him to go back to serving a dark way of life through sin and doubt. There is much work to do in our partnership with God, and He lends us great power and resources to get it done. A whole new way of being has opened up to us, and now that it has, we must cease to operate out of desperation and begin to move out of God’s overflow. It is impossible for another person to fill our cups. We were created to be filled with God’s Spirit, so that we can live life through His love.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. 

“A New Life of Love” by Alexandra Copeland. Springfield Fellowship © 2020. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.