“Love others as I have loved you. Turn from thinking only of yourself. It consumes too much of your time and energy. When functioning outside of My ways, your carnal mind begins to worry and becomes concerned about the circumstances around you, because it can only function in carnal ways while living in carnal responses.
“When you love others with selfless love, you function in spiritual realms where the Holy Spirit moves to change you. My power anoints your days. My presence brings you the kind of peace that allows you to remain functioning with Me, no matter what is happening around you. Choose this day to love others as I love. I will then choose to bring Myself into your midst.”
Most of us fail to continually function in the spiritual realm because we have such limited knowledge of how it works. We don’t understand that powerful spiritual tools - such as loving someone or forgiving someone, especially someone who hates us or misuses us - initiate spiritual responses from our Lord. These responses change our character more and more into the character of Jesus each time we choose to function in them, rather than functioning in our old carnal ways of hate and unforgiveness. God’s spiritual responses bring us close to Him, while carnal reactions keep us imprisoned in our old carnal ways and submitted to the father of lies.
Most of us go through this walk with our God void of any of the fullness that was intended for us. Our days are filled with seemingly meaningless - but at the time urgent - tasks that fill our time until we are caught in an endless circle of lifeless days. There is reason for this: it is because we do not love others as God does. Here’s what His Word says:
John 15: 9-14 NIV
9) “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
10) If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
11) I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
12) My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.
13) Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.
14 You are my friends if you do what I command.”
The Father saw Jesus through His kind of love and His joy was complete. Jesus saw us through His and His Father’s kind of love, and His joy was complete. He told us of His Father’s ways, so that our joy may be complete. He has us in mind in all that He does. We see others through our imperfect, selfish kind of love and wonder why we have little or no joy. It doesn’t take much reasoning to figure out the simplicity of God’s equation.
It goes like this: Choose to love others with God’s motives for loving someone, and then there will be great joy in every area of your life. If you choose not to love with God’s kind of love, joy will not be found in you, at least not complete joy.
Let Your joy be complete in me and through me,
Jim Corbett
