The Tribune

By REV ANGELA PALACIOUS

The benefit and blessing of being loved by God has personal and interpersonal advantages.

Consider the following list:

1. God’s love will never forsake or abandon us, or let us go.

2. This is the love that teaches us how to love our neighbour and ourselves.

3. This love teaches us to practice respect and courtesy.

4. Our heart becomes enlarged by our intimate communion with God, to be able to love in different ways, at different times, and at different levels. It is the intensity of love that will be ready for commitment, ideally as a learned behaviour.

5. We come to love ourselves as we see ourselves through God’s eyes: Psalm 139: verses 13-15 speak of our being “knit together in our mother’s womb…our frames not being hidden from God when we were being made in secret.” We are no strangers to God and we can never become so. Again, the psalmist says in verses 1-6: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know me when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is so high that I cannot attain it.”

6. We come to know more of God. The God who knows us so intimately desires to be known in greater depth. God reaches out to us in the image of father, brother, mother hen, husband, using the relationships we know well. Who can miss the heart-wrenching poignancy of Jesus weeping for Jerusalem, like a mother hen whose wayward chicks are heading for the teeth of the fox: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing.” It is only as we learn to respond to this love with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, that we have the right kind of wood to build a fire that will burn for all eternity.

7. Prayer is the way to listen and speak to God, along with the study of God’s word which allows the heart of God to speak to our hearts.

8. We are aware of our sinfulness in the presence of holiness; we confess and receive forgiveness.

9. This means that in all other relationships, we are now capable of a new level of authenticity. Each time we are open and honest with the Lord and ourselves we are capable of a sustained friendship with others. We are challenged by the Holy Spirit to become a person of integrity who brings to the whole of life a growing desire to be open and honest, faithful and trustworthy, to be serious and yet capable of great joy and rich humour.

10. Our love life with the Lord sets ablaze our excitement for life, our readiness for commitment and our spontaneous affection and appropriate devotion. With our life, firmly rooted and grounded in the grace of God, in the person of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, there will be less danger of our making an idol of another human being since we answer to Jesus for our every thought, word, and action.

11. God’s desire is for us to be nurtured in a christian home, and raised on christian principles, in order to see ourselves as a reflection of the image of God as our first identity. In this way, we answer life’s deepest questions for ourselves before we may be tempted to look for another to define us:

a) Who am I? A child of God

b) What is my purpose? To love and serve the Lord

c) What is my method? To use the gifts God has given me to bring honour, and glory to God’s name.

1. Our love for the Lord brings us through a series of refining fires that continue to make us holy. It is this self in the process of daily transformation that we give to one another as the best gift possible. The Spirit of God lessens our selfishness, our self-centeredness, our jealousy, envy, critical spirit, pride and anger.

God’s plan for our relationships is to build them on a firm foundation of faith that will keep us focused and centred first on the Lord and then on both our neighbours and ourselves.

• Rev Angela Palacious, a motivational speaker and author of several devotional books, is an Anglican priest. She may be contacted at 393-9000 or by e-mail at angelapalacious@gmail.com.