I remember when I was a little girl, I had a dog. Boy, I was crazy about that dog. He got sick, very sick. I don't think we ever took our dogs to a vet. Maybe there weren't any or we didn't have the money. People just didn't do it then.
My dad told me he was going to have to shoot my dog to keep her from suffering. I trusted my dad and what he was saying. I knew my dog had to die. I remember getting on my bike and I began to ride away as fast and as hard as I could with tears. I heard the shot and I stopped. I cried for awhile and I turned my bike around and I went home. Dad had buried my dog.
Unless God show us our self centeredness and what He did in sending His Son for us, we are utterly unable to love another person for them and not for ourselves.
There is no greater love than this, that you lay down your life for one another. Jesus gave His life to save us. Are we willing to give our life to save another person. By that I mean are we willing to be vulnerable to pain, rejection and sin in order to open our hearts to another person?
My mom told me that day my dad had to shoot my dog. Deborah you have to decide something in your life. Is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all. We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and blameless as a praise and worship to our God? When we give of ourselves to love another person...I am speaking of all kinds not just romantic love but brotherly love, a parents love, when we are loving them for them and not for what it can do for us, God says this is the worship that pleases Him. We can go on Sunday morning or in our daily lives and raise our hands and listen to our music to God, but what God wants as worship is our hearts. When we receive His unconditional love for us and know what He did on the cross for us, first we are able to love God in a sacrificial way but then we are also willing to lose our life for another person in order to give them the love of God through us.
If I had really loved my dog, I wouldn't have left him that day. He was fixing to die. All I could think of was me, my loss, my pain and what was I going to do without him. My dog loved me, as far as a dog can. I know he wanted me with him in his death and I wasn't. I wasn't willing to sacrifice myself for the dog that I loved.
God is love. Christ is our example and our power by His Spirit and His grace for us to love another person with the love God so beautifully and sacrificially loves us with. Christ is besotted with us, in love with, swept off His feet by, love sick for. He has waited so long for us friends. Will we die for Him? Will we worship Him with everything in us? Will we lay it all down for the sake of Christ? Will we learn to die for another person, not only for Jesus to give us life but for us to impart life, through Him, to another person? Faith, Hope and Love but the greatest of these is love.
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