Our love can only be measured against God’s and his against ours. He always loves; we don’t. His love is deep; ours is shallow. Christians often misinterpret the narrow road of the kingdom of God. God’s narrow road is wide enough to admit passage to those who crucified him. Perhaps that is what makes God’s road seem hard for us and, therefore, narrow—we seldom allow those who slander us to travel with us.
We find it easy to love those who are easy to love. If someone is likable, I can love them. But God loves more than the unlovable; he also loves those that I find unlikeable.
Easy love is not love; it is ease.
Love is truly love when loving is hard. I am tempted to say that "love means more when the person God asks us to love is difficult to love" but that would imply that love’s meaning can be diminished. It cannot; either the love we have for others is love or it isn’t. We are either loving or we are unloving. God loves the person that insults him; he also loves the person that insults him by insulting me. Do I?
You cannot insult the image of God in others and love God at the same time. To insult another human is to insult what God made; to do that is to insult God—yet God loves us just the same.
Since God loves those who hate him, our love can only be shown by our dedication to love those that challenge our love. Those challenges come from our enemies—and your enemy includes anyone you ignore and anyone who merely annoys you. We have much to learn about Jesus’ love for others. We will never learn it unless we let Jesus love others through us.
His love is measured by our failed attempts at it. Believe it or not, this is good news because it means that His love is greater than our failures. We fail almost every day; his love is everyday—because of that, it is uncommon. Rest in that and continue to live in it. God’s love is sufficient. Enter the narrow path and discover its wideness.
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