Are you responding to Christ’s love with steadfast obedience?
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| English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The idea of the Father no longer loving the Son is unimaginable and wholly impossible. The love between the divine persons is unbreakable, eternal, and steadfast. It can no more cease to be than God Himself can cease to exist. Can we even begin to understand the scope, the depth, the height of such love? Yet, this is the love that binds us to Christ. It is His love that secures our salvation. It is His love that maintains us through every situation in life. It is His love that endures to the end and enables us to be inwardly transformed even as He calls us to exert our own wills and obey His commands. This is the love in which we abide and from which we receive our strength and our ability to persevere in holiness.
This abiding love is closely connected with the eternal nature of the Trinity. God Himself is love, and the love shared between the Father and the Son is of an enduring nature, an eternal generation of love that cannot be broken. This is the love from which we are separated when we are in our unredeemed state. But, when we are adopted as children into the family of God, this is the love in which we have a part. As His adopted children, we are unified with Christ, and nothing can separate us from His love. This is the promise expressed in Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?.… For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This love is exactly what Jesus was talking about: “the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” And what should our response be to such a love? Cold indifference? Rebellion? No! Our response should be sincere, steadfast obedience to the commands of our Lord. Notice once again the intimate connection between love and obedience: the Father loves the Son, the Son loves His church; the Son obeys the Father, the church obeys the Son. As Christ so perfectly modeled, the appropriate reaction to love is humble submission and steadfast obedience, even if it means giving up one’s life.
Meditate on Romans 8:31–39, and if you have the time 1 Corinthians 13. In light of these passages, what solutions do you find to defeat the lack of love that we feel at times? What does it mean to be secure in Christ’s love? Are you responding to Christ’s love with steadfast obedience?
