I have loved you one thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine years before you arrived here and, I have known you completely since eternity began. I know someday you will believe me when I say I am the only one with the will to love you, all.
For most of my life Maslow’s hierarchy of needs told me that my primary needs were physiological but the older and wiser I become, I am seeing that man indeed shall not live by bread alone.
I have come to hold that a human is not merely a physical being but is in fact a spiritual being having a physical experience. Yet much of my human life so far has been spent on catering to physical needs, wants, and whims while my spirit, the real me, shriveled to the edge of total destruction. I’ve heard mothers and fathers specify love for children demonstrated through feeding and sheltering, clothing, and educating. While all these things are important, they are still catering to the physical experience, and more often, many people’s physical needs are sated but inside the true being is famished.
Love is the food, shelter, and clothing for the spirit being, our true selves. Every human sooner or later becomes compelled to seek out love supplements. No matter how well parents, friends, and lovers may endeavor to satisfy our spirit’s hunger and thirst, like empty genetically modified foods, man cannot satisfy the spirit’s insatiable demand for pure and whole love. Unsated, man forages for substitutes that may fill the aching hole in the heart, until in the end, he resigns to the torment of never knowing the sweet satiety of being fully known and loved.
The popular phrase “money makes the world go around” has never sat well with me. Sure, I understand that money is an essential thing in life but the truth, I believe is that Love makes the world go around and is the quintessential sustenance for humanity to flourish in extraordinary ways, yet unknown.
In all history, there has been one person who demonstrated the power of love to propel him to be and do superhuman wonders in the physical realm and he ascribed his abilities to the fact that he was completely secure in love.
When I used to hear Christians dish out the cliché “Jesus loves you”, my heart raged until I would echo the Israelite’s demand ‘How have you loved us?’ Looking at the circumstances of my life then, I failed to see where this love was.
Have you ever heard people say, or maybe you have also said “If God loved…then this or that shouldn’t be happening”?
Somehow humanity’s concept of love is skewed towards tangibly visible transactions, performances, and conditions. Again it seems we derive what love is or should be from a misunderstanding that we are primarily spiritual beings and not only physical matters. We also error because love is as invisible and spiritual as our unseen spirit being therefore cannot be constrained to only the sensual experience. Moreover, most of the definitions we have for love are etched in brokenness. No wonder they could never offer the whole that our spirit requires.
The notion that love is eternal sunshine, smooth-stemmed roses, and luxurious comfort leaves most of us disillusioned. If we wait to know love through feelings, signs, and wonders, we may languish in vain. But if we can consider that all we’ve come up with concerning love’s expressions and intentions are distortions, we will begin to perceive the true nature of love and how He loves us so.
So how has he loved us we ask?
It is a pity that our familiarity with this truth causes us to scornfully dismiss it. But I give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in whose grace I was given the sense to pause and ponder the weight of each word, and therein found all that my heart spent years searching for and never coming close to attaining.
Frankly, no one has ever loved me or you to the point of giving up their very best, to the point of death and resurrection, with our complete well-being their fixation.
Before I knew how much God loves me, I sought wholehearted acceptance and belonging from my parents, siblings, friendships, and boys but somehow their expressions always fell short. I am sure that my feeble attempts to love those in my life were equally, if not more, miserable.
Because we are mortal, we are limited. We can have only so much patience before frustration snaps our flimsy efforts. We can expend kindness to the extent that we are not disenfranchised or depleted. We need devoted and inexhaustible attention, understanding, patience, kindness, forgiveness, and mercy yet with our busy lives, responsibilities, personal struggles, narrow insight, and prejudice we simply could never ply one another with love in the measures our hearts require.
The first step in knowing how much you are loved begins by acknowledging the fact that you are a sinner. And trust me, this is no easy feat. Because of our deep-seated defect, pride, none of us ever wants to see or be shown that we are wretches to the core. When a conflict occurs, it’s always someone else to blame. I have often marveled at this innate evil in us when a collision happens on the roads. No one wants to say “oh dear, it was my fault.” Instead lengthy arguments begin. When we do accept fault, we are not fully satisfied unless the other party also acknowledges some part they played. In the context of relationships, neither parent nor child wants to accept full responsibility for their actions and omissions that corrupted or harmed the relationship. In marriage, the adulterer may accept responsibility for the act but justifies it on account of the other’s neglect. This is the classic proverb of pots calling kettles black, the inherited affliction from our ancestry in the Garden of Eden.
Being a sinner is the state of being imperfect and the incapacity of perfectly being and doing what is right all the time, which naturally is to be human. We must face our fallen, sinful humanity to perceive and gain understanding, and experience perfection, which can and may only come from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Freedom from self-importance has got to be a large peace of heaven on earth. It is so wonderful to see ourselves soberly, as we are. This in turn births and grows humility and reverence with God, our neighbor, and ourselves. In these states and postures, we enjoy being loved and loving in return as the gifts they are, not the demands we imagined were entitled to us.
Recognizing and submitting to the fact that God is irrefutably holy, which simply means that he is abidingly perfect in all he is and does, is the right step to knowing and enjoying a love like no other.
A love that transcends time. Love that keeps no record of wrongs. Love that rejoices in doing what is right. A love that loves unto death.
Love is doing what is right perfectly at all times. What is right is to obey God. Therefore to obey God is to love God and to love God is to do what is right, thereby fulfilling all righteousness.
Sin is doing what is not right or doing what is right substandard of consistent perfection.
Righteousness – doing what is right perfectly at all times – brings forth the glory of God.
Jesus Christ fulfilled all righteousness because he loved God by obeying God even unto death, thereby doing what is right. This is why God accepted and approved him and was pleased with him to bring forth the glory of God: ultimate righteousness; Love
Therefore it was only right, that God demonstrated his righteousness – perfect love – in Jesus Christ by laying on him the punishment that man’s unrighteousness demanded.
Though he had done nothing wrong, he exchanged his righteousness in credit to humanity so that heaven and earth may know the Love (righteousness) of God. It was only right that God would raise Jesus Christ from the dead; for having obeyed, therefore doing what is right, and ultimately loving God to the extent he did, God glorified him by raising him from the dead.
In Christ, once and for all, God demonstrates his Love that is rooted and established in doing what is right (righteousness), glorifying (rewarding) righteousness, and condemning (executing) unrighteousness so that whosoever believes in His holy Son shall not perish but inherit eternal life, forever in the love of God.
Christ’s perfect love was offered as our covering from hate of God (disobedience, rebellion, sin) that fulfills all unrighteousness demanding all of God’s wrath [Genesis 4:7, Romans 6:23, 3:23].
This immutable love demands a response: to be recognized, appreciated, and considered supreme as it and He is; to be received faithfully and enjoyed with gratefulness, and to be reciprocated in the generosity we have received it, for freely we have received, freely we must give.
We were made for love, to be loved and to be love.
We live out who we are. If we are loved well, and perfectly, we will love. But we must first let ourselves be loved in a love like this.
We give what we have. If we accept to receive washing, rehabilitation, nourishing, and nurturing in a love like this, we will generously share with the starving around us. But we must first bask in receiving the freely given gift of a love like this.
Since I was adopted into the Kingdom of God and checked into Love’s rehab, I am consistently, gently, and patiently being loved to wholeness. My spirit feels less and less emaciated. I am more and more tasting and living in the abundant life of heaven citizenship. I had searched far and wide but now I am fully persuaded that there is absolutely nothing else out there for the human spirit but all that is in the love of God, the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
With all that said, friend, would you be loved and be love or perish at the end of the age?
xoxo
Nimi
Kingdom Purposed Daughter 
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