Discovery: Many things in life are "caught" and not "taught." This is very true in the Christian life. The principle of serving and loving is not something that we do because someone told us to. It is something that is modeled to us and thus we learn to emulate it. 1 John 4:19 tells us this: "We love because he first loved us." God set the example of how to love and serve. We need to simply reflect this to the world around us.
Application: It's one thing to know the truth but it is another to live it out. This love that God demonstrated to us is not some sort of philosophical idea or intellectual principle. It needs to be a living reality. We need to ask ourselves the question, "Am I experiencing the love of God for myself firsthand?" In addition, we need to be asking the question, "Am I loving and serving others in the same way that God loved me?" We need to do a little inventory of our lives to see if love is truly flowing in and out of us.
The reality is that being loved and loving others is not easy and thus there are real barriers and obstacles that prevent us from doing it. For some, they have never experienced the love of God at all. They have not acknowledge the fact that God is the seeker and savior of the lost. Others have become calloused in their hearts and thus have forgotten that they were once counted among the lost. One way to know if you have a calloused heart is if you have fallen out of the practice of repenting of your sins. As we get "older" in our faith, we begin to simply accumulate our sins until it reaches a boiling point before we come to the cross and repent of them. For others, they simple stop coming to the cross at all.
The only way that we can love and serve is to ask God to pour out His love anew into us today. We need to remove things such as sin that blocks our ability to receive this love but most importantly we need to choose to turn our hearts towards Him again. We can't settle for a broken, defeated, lesser life. We need to settle for nothing less that experiencing His love on a daily basis. This is why we love and serve... because He first loved (and continues to love) us.
Prayer: Lord I love being at the foot of the cross. Help me find my way back "home" to this place each and every day.
