Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today – know the intensity of being loved by God in order to echo that love to others, and make this your “above all” of your life.
1 Peter 4:8 TPT
[8] Above all, constantly echo God’s intense love for one another, for love will be a canopy over a multitude of sins.
Observation
“Above all,” love one another. This is the final and full summary of life in God and love. For love covers the brokenness of life, the “multitude of sins” that accompany all of our lives. We are more sinful than we will ever realise or disclose and we are more loved than we can imagine or hope to be. Love covers sin, this is why love is the key. It’s not a demand – stop sinning, but keep being loved. For love not only covers, it also corrects and heals us from sin. It’s not judgment and punishment, it’s intense love that brings transformative influence into our being. Love covers so I am not disqualified from love, and then love invites engagement where from the embrace of love I am healed and restored and transformed.
Now this love for one another is “echoed love.” This means we are to be so closely joined to God, who is love, that we become its echo. In this case, we join ourselves so closely to God’s love that we “echo” his forgiving, intense love toward one another. You won’t be this love outside of being loved by love herself. You cannot manufacture this love, that is why it alludes the world to a large degree, it is echoed love that flows from the intimate experience of being intensely loved. I don’t forgive because I am told to, I forgive because love has forgiven me and I echo my personal experience to others.
Application
Above all, be loved and be love. Be loved deeply and intensely so the echo is loud. This is what my world and those in it need from me more than anything else. So develop the rhythms of being intimately loved by love, so that my echo is not obedient dutiful behaviour but the overflow of intimate experience.
Response
Thank you that love is above all. Thank you that you love me into love. Thank you that you do not leave me with a religious book of demanded performance and judgment reward motivation. Thank you that love is not demanded of me, as if it could be. Rather thank you that love is the echo of my intimate intense experience of being loved. This life of love is more beautiful than anything I could ever create from the offerings of the world.
Meditation
Meditate – above all love one another.
Consider:
Is your love for others an echo of being loved?
Do you have the rhythms of being intensely loved established in the flow of your life?
Is love “above all” in your life?
JOURNEY DEEPER
