Matthew 22:34-40 / “But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

6. All sin is ultimately a defect in love – either toward God, or my neighbor. And one always includes the other. I cannot sin against God without it being bad for my neighbor, and I cannot sin against my neighbor without it also being a sin against God. Gal. 5:14-26. But it all begins with a defect in my perception of God’s love!

The human as the image bearer of God, is not a source, but only a responder.

God is love, but we are not.

Our love must and can only spring from His.

We cannot generate it on our own.

When we try, the perverse product is defective in every way.

We must and only can love as we know His love for us.

Had Adam and Eve suspected no defect in God’s love for them, they would have remained invincible against temptation and sin.

It was in their suspicion that His love kept back from them something good, some necessary or accordant blessing of love, that they then failed to love Him and one another in return.

We cannot fix our love in a vacuum or independently, for we cannot produce love – we can only reflect it.

In that we perceive anything at all defective in His love, that defect will be magnified in us as reflectors, and eclipse the whole of His love, seeing only the defect, and fearing the loss – we will angrily lash out in sin to obtain what we believe we are being deprived of.

We must study to know the love of God for us in Christ above all things.

Only by deep, rich, full, Spirit revealed beams of God’s love penetrating our hearts and minds, illumining our souls, can we ever come to love Him back, and those who too are made in His image.

Left to ourselves, love will be a tormenting fire, but never a liberating light.

Holy Spirit, make me to know Divine love.

I can pray nothing higher for myself, my wife, my daughter, my son-in-law, my grandchildren, my church or my enemies than this.

Do not leave me to myself, for my love is but a sullied and defective reflection, currently distorted by my sin.

Please send your Spirit to strengthen me/us in the inner man to – so that Christ has His manifest dwelling there.

So that we are enabled to know your love in purity and fullness.

That we might be filled with the fullness of God – for it is only found in knowing your love.

Fill me.

The faith that the just must live in – is the faith to believe God as He has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus, making an all sufficient sacrifice for sin, calling all to come and be reconciled, and overcoming in vast numbers the unwillingness that resides in us all.

Oh grand, divine, in fathomable mystery of God’s great love!

Who can know it?

Who can understand it?

Who dares to so revel and rely upon it as to live in its perpetual and limitless joy?

May I!