“Letting God Love People Through You”

But now faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
—1 Corinthians 13:13, NASB

Perhaps one of the greatest privileges any of us can experience is being a vessel through whom God can express and release His love to others. To know God in a deepening relationship is life itself, but to release any portion of His being to another is better yet. Selflessness is the bridge within us that God uses to facilitate that exchange. Tending our garden, in an ultimate sense, is having and recognizing a specific set of people whom God wants to target through us the expression of His love.

The word “love,” properly understood, is an attempt to describe the essence of God’s nature which we humans can experience to some degree for a person, experience, activity, or thing. Love carries within it a number of related attributes, such as deep commitment, self-denial for the sake of what is loved, and a willingness to make that which is loved a centering point of one’s life. Love, being an active verb, can and should grow in depth and complexity within us as our capacity to experience it from God gradually expands our own being. Love is the strongest of human emotions and is capable of producing enormous sacrifice for the sake of that which is loved.

How Much Love Can God Release Through You?

In a very real sense, God hates sin because it “clogs the arteries” of our spiritual hearts and blocks His capacity to transmit His love to each other through us. Being in “the ministry” is really all about this—letting God love other people through us as we grow in our commitment to walk away from our sins and unclog our spiritual arteries for the sake of others. Many have defined the ministry as preaching, pastoring, praying for others, and a host of other well-intentioned activities. At this point in my life, I define it as letting God love others through us and paying the price to let the Holy Spirit get ourselves out of God’s way.

As God has been deepening this reality in my life, I am increasingly experiencing the flow of God’s love for particular people, to the point that I have to remind God of my own limits as a fallen human being! I’m sure He knows those limits clearly, but it reminds me of my diminished capacity and my need for grace to become an enlarged vessel for God’s own need to express more of His love to others through me. In this sense, God Himself has an “insatiable need” to express His love to us all directly and through each other as well. Jesus, of course, is the Father’s ultimate vehicle of the expression of all things. And that, beloved friends, is…

THE BOTTOM LINE.

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