1 Peter 1:22 – Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.
As the prophet famously said, “God’s ways are not our ways…”. The Lord changes us into other ways we would never begin to comprehend. He does this not with rules and requirements but He does it in a much more subtle way; He changes us by love. His love is irresistible, intoxicating, and transformative. He draws us in by just loving us, we drink this love in and surprisingly we like it; and why not? His love is highly intoxicating. But wait, that leads us to the most shocking part; it is in enjoying this pleasurable, intoxicating love that we are changed. We become lovers of God. Not only do we love God but this purifying love causes us to love others. We are drawn in by love, intoxicated by love, and then we are transformed by His love. This is way more than we ever expected. C.S. Lewis connects the dots for us, we become worshippers and are changed into different people.
“Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.…A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ’, to become like God.”
Like most everyone else maybe you feel overwhelmed by what you consider as the requirements the Lord is placing on you. Just take a breath and relax for a minute. Maybe the answer is easier than you realize, maybe the answer is as simple as surrendering to Him, bowing down in worship, and letting Him do the rest. That’s the way it is, we can’t but He surely can. The best news is that He is drawing you in to be one of His chosen vessels of love.
