Here is the revelation that is shaping my life today – how can something as simple as this be so missed, so out of our focus, so sacrificed? Love is the entire goal of life.
1 Timothy 1:5 TPT
[5] For we reach the goal of fulfilling all the commandments when we love others deeply with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and sincere faith.
Observation
When love is the goal of everything how can it be that we put love on the sacrificial altar to achieve some other end? The goal is reached when we love, so love. Love must trump, season, shape, and be lifted higher than, any other activity, cause or goal is undertaken. The guiding question must always be – ‘how do I love deeply here? Did I love deeply there?’
Is it that I want outcomes more than how I arrive at them? Do I value success more than the means? Do I want justice more than love? Do I value being ‘right’ more than being ‘love?’ Is my ultimate goal more about me, my desires, my security, and my significance, more than loving deeply? Am I stuck in a transactional modality that demands love be earned, deserved, aroused, worthed, rather than just freely deeply, purely given regardless of all else? Can I live in a world where loving others deeply trumps every other demand of my life, my feelings, and my rightness? Can I live in a world where this is not the case?
No wonder love is a mess. When love is the ultimate goal then no wonder love is attacked by the enemy of love more viciously, more deceptively, more passionately than any other thing in our lives, in our love communities. We know we all need love, we know it’s the air of our existence, but we speak more about its absence and its lack than we do about its personal beauty. We seem to sacrifice it for such little trinkets of rewards, like being right, that one would ask about our sanity.
Love can’t be taught, it can’t really be well conversed, because ultimately love is the language of the heart, not the intellect. It is found in experience and encounters not in classical classrooms and book learning criteria. Ultimately, love is all that the church should reflect, invite, and share. It is our only message – you are loved just as you, without cause, and you are welcome in the embrace of love. Then help facilitate the encounter. Then by the way we personally experience and reflect love to each other the world will know love itself. (someone really smart said that once, John recorded him). Why don’t we have the ears to listen to this simplicity?
Application
Get back to love as the all in all. The goal of all my life, all my interactions. All that makes me is found by being loved and then reflecting this through being love. Never put love on the sacrificial altar of another end or cause. Never withdraw love’s expression for some other end. Never transact love. Just love others deeply from the depth of experience of loves self. I will establish the rhythms that enable me to be present to love as the foundation for my life.
Response
Thank you for loving me unconditionally, freely, unreservedly, and unending. I love that you are not distant but as intimate as love itself, for you are love itself. You call us to yourself, love, and then make the expression of you the goal of our lives. For I was made in the image of love so why would anything else have a higher priority? I love this life of love, what an amazing story for life.
Meditation
Meditate – I reach the goal of fulfilling all the commandments when I love others deeply.
Consider:
Have you been loved by love?
Do you celebrate and live from the intimacy of love’s unconditional, uncaused, unending embrace of you?
JOURNEY DEEPER
