A daily thought ~ obeying

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.
John 14:21 ESV

Do we love Him? I find this can be a challenging question, do I truely love Him? It’s not that I don’t want to love, or that I don’t think I do love Him. Rather, I am a person who shows love through physical concrete things, like touch, gifts and time spent together. You’ve got to admit, it’s very hard to find physical manifestations of these things from God! Great things can happen in life which clearly are gifts from God but my brain still has to acknowledge that fact. Its much easier when someone walks into a room with a gift or better still, I can walk into a room with a gift for someone. I adore being able to spend time and money creating the perfect gift! Its one of my favourite ways to show love. So, it makes showing love to God hard for me. I can’t just walk into a room with a gift for God, He isn’t a physical entity that you can give physical objects to. While we are called to give Him gifts, its a much more abstract concept, such as giving Him ourselves, our lives and devoting ourselves to Him.

That’s one of the reasons I love verses like these. They give practical instructions on how to show love to God. Obey His commandments. Sounds simple enough right?! Well, if you’ve ever tried to obey them you’d know the answer is kinda yes and no. Yes the concept is simple, look for Jesus’ commandments through the new testament and live by them. But, actually living them out is challenging. None of us are perfect and our flesh wages war against the spirit. But, this is where the beauty of this verse comes in, the Holy Spirit comes into our lives and reveals to us 1) Jesus’ commandments and how to live them out in our day-to-day life and 2) He makes it possible. Without supernatural intervention, it is impossible to please God.

May we live a life loving Jesus and living out His commandments. It is worth everything to know both the Father and the Son love us and want to be in relationship with us through the spirit.

♡