THOUGHTS ON LOVING JESUS

"I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." John 17:26 ESV

On the night before Jesus was crucified, Jesus prayed for you and me. That's right dear reader, Jesus prayed for you! Not only that, but of all the things that He could have asked the Father, I am astounded that this is what He asked for us:

"... that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." What does Jesus ask the Father in Heaven, our Maker? That the very love that the Father has for His only begotten, most precious, most beloved Son would be in us! This is amazing! This is stupendous!

Jesus is asking that we would love Him in a way that whereby Jesus is as precious, as valuable, to us as He is to the Father in Heaven. There is no greater love in the entire universe than the love flowing between the Father and the Son in the holy Trinity. No love is more perfect, more powerful, more intense, more continuous, more pure, and more full of delight in the beloved, than the love God the Father has for the Son. It is energy of joy that makes hydrogen bombs look like firecrackers.

Oh, how the Father delights in the Son! Oh, how precious the Son is to the Father!

"This is my beloved Son, with whom 1 am well pleased," God the Father said at Jesus' baptism (Matthew 3:17).
"This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him," God the Father said at the transfiguration (Matthew 17:5).
"Jesus is the living Stone-rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him” (1 Peter 2:4).

In the entire universe none is more precious to God the Father than His Son, Jesus Christ. He is loved with perfect, infinite, divine love. That is how precious He should be to us.

Oh how much does the Father love the Son! Is this not a most wonderful thing,—that God's own love to Jesus should dwell in our hearts? And yet it is so. The love wherewith we love Christ, mark you, is God's love to Christ: "That the love that You have loved Me may be in them.”

Frankly when I read this, I get both excited and discouraged at the same time. First, I get discouraged because there is such a disconnect between Jesus' prayer and my own daily experience. My love for Jesus on my best days is weak, fickle, failing, inconsistent, and limited to my own capacity to love, which is pretty small. I find myself loving His gifts much more than Him. I often treasure the trivial, the inconsequential, the fleeting pleasures of life, and the trite, and am dull to what is lovely and important. In short, I need serious help to do what Jesus prays for me to do.

But when I read and contemplate this prayer hope rises within me and I get excited because I have hope that the Father, who hears the prayer of His Son, will Himself answer this prayer and do something supeernatural, outside of me, to me, and put in me. He will give me a capacity to love His Son in a way that Jesus deserves to be loved.

My imagination soars as I think about the possibility to love and enjoy Jesus with the very love and delight that the Father has for Him forever! Wow!

Three things in this life limit my ability to love and enjoy Jesus and help me to understand what I need from the Father:

1.Nothing in this world has a personal worth that is great enough to satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.
2. We do not have the strength to love and savor Jesus to His maximum worth.
3. All of our joys here on this earth come to an end. Nothing lasts.
But, for you and me, if the Father answers the prayer of Jesus, all this will change!

If God answers this prayer from Jesus, then the Father's love for His Son will become your love. If God answers this prayer, then God's delight in His Son will become your delight, and the object of His love and pleasure, Jesus, will be inexhaustible in His worth and value to you. In short, a supernatural miracle will take place within your heart. You will love Jesus with the Father's love!

Jesus will never become boring to you. Nothing and no one will ever compete for your affections for Jesus. Nothing will ever be more valuable to you than Jesus. Your ability to love this inexhaustible, eternal, infinite Son of God will no longer be confined and limited by human weakness. We will freely love and freely delight in Jesus the Son with the very delight and joy of His omnipotent loving and delighting Father. God's love for His Son will be in us and it will be ours, and this will never end because neither the Father nor the Son ever end. Their love for each other will be our love for them, and therefore, our love will never, ever die.

All true love that the Father delights in and accepts from us, is nothing but His own love, which has come streaming down from His own heart into our renewed minds. Jesus' longing and goal is that we see His glory and then that we be able to love what we see with the same love that the Father has for the Son, and He doesn't mean that we merely imitate the love of the Father for the Son. He means the Father's very love becomes our love for the Son, that we love the Son with the love of the Father for the Son. This is what the Spirit bestows in our lives: Love for the Son by the Father through the Spirit.

It can begin right now in your own experience as you agree with Jesus and join Him asking the Father for this ultimate desire of His Son for your own life. When you pray this prayer watch the love of God to begin working to change you so that you enjoy loving Him deeper, wider, higher, and stronger with His own love working within and pouring out and up towards His Son forever and ever and ever. May you want this. May you desire to be loved by God so that you can love God.
AMEN!

Exuberant about the Father's love for Jesus being in me,
Pastor Bill