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For some reason Tina Turner’s song, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” keeps going through my head. Love, a stupid “second hand emotion,” right? That false notion actually all fits in quite well with Sam’s post the other day and now Mel Wild’s,” The Power of His Love.”

What’s love got to do with it? Everything!

The Bible says, “it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance.” The Bible also says, “God is love.” And it says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” And, “We love because He first loved us.” And “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

I hope that doesn’t sound critical or shaming because a whole lot of us are just like a kinked up garden hose that can’t let genuine love flow through. We’ve either gotten all scarred up from the world or we didn’t have our needs met as a child. It’s not an admonishment like, “you must embrace the chore of trying to love more,” but rather, you must be loved more yourself.

I suggest that when Jesus tells Peter “unless I wash you, you’ll have no part of me,” what He’s actually saying is, unless you let me love you,  you can’t really know me.

Later when we encounter the woman with the perfume, Jesus says,” Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.”  By the way, Matthew 26:13 also says, “Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Why? Because that’s the key to the whole gospel. That’s the heart of the matter. One might even say, it’s the whole fragrance of who Jesus is. He Himself thought this was so important,  The Bible says, “wherever the gospel is preached….” tell of what she has done.

I once heard someone say,  “A loveless gospel is a bloodless gospel.” A gospel without the Blood of Jesus has no power to transform us, no power to save us, no life, no resurrection in it. Mel was right to name His post,“The Power of His Love.”

Love conquers everything. It’s the only force that ever has. Love is more powerful than fear, more powerful than the law, more powerful than good preaching, more powerful then elegant doctrine. In fact, the Bible says that too! “Though I speak with the tongue of angels…” Without love it is completely meaningless.

The other day I was just crying in sheer frustration. A lot of religious people, a lot of Christian people, avoid love, fear love, question love. Over and over again I slam into what basically amounts too, “you can’t talk about God’s love, people need to hear about His wrath and hatred of sin, because repentance must proceed being accepted by Him.”

This little pet peeve makes me quite crazy,  because one doesn’t have a prayer, one doesn’t stand a chance, with that false perception. We are dead in our trespasses, a kinked up garden hose unable to receive His love. If we could just make ourselves presentable first, we wouldn’t need His saving grace in the first place.

Some people think I’m being wishy washy, as if to say, we can just love everybody and affirm them as they are and Jesus will just be our BFF forever. Actually no, it’s far, far, more serious than that, it’s really a matter of life and death. Without His love, there is no redemption, no chance, no life.

And there are a whole lot of dead people sitting in church right now like a kinked up garden hose pretending they know the Lord….

I got a little cranky, I got a little feisty last week, because there are some people in my life who wouldn’t shed a tear if I got hit by a freight train or died of a drug over dose, but they’ll sure scream bloody murder over the Passion Bible? Like, if you haven’t said a word, not a single word to me in over a decade,  don’t suddenly show up and start lecturing me about drinking blue kool aid and telling me you just care about my walk with the Lord.  Pfffttt.

I spoke to a girl recently, she just got baptized, she’s loving the Lord, after nearly a decade in church. I asked her, so what changed? She’d simply walked into a new church, and a woman gave her a hug and another wrapped her shoulders with a blanket and the pastor asked if he could baptize her. She said it was the first time in her life that the love of the Lord had ever felt real to her.

We can’t receive what we can’t feel and we don’t recognize.

There’s a verse in the Bible,  in Romans 10 that says, “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” So. Many. People. think this means preaching, doctrine, theology, reading the Bible as if by rote, as if it can be absorbed through osmosis.

We hear with our heart.

 

woman doing hand heart sign

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