Reduced to Love

As I was reading from the book, Total Love, by Frances J. Roberts, she penned a thought that struck my heart. Speaking of joy, she wrote, “It doesn’t come from being popular or rich or powerful; it comes from being reduced to love.”

How can you or I be reduced to love?

The answer is experiencing joy through the avenue of a personal, thriving relationship with Jesus Christ. If I want to reach a fullness of joy, the one and only way there, is to know God. Not just know about Him, but learning and growing in an understanding of His true character and heart, as revealed in His Word. Out of knowing Him, I will grow deeper in love with Him. I am not speaking of a cheap kind of love we so often suffer from, but a true, intimate love that views everything else besides for His glory as filthy rags. In response then to loving Him, I will spend myself for Him, caring about what burdens His heart, and fully obeying whatever He asks of me. And if I have a fullness of joy, then my life will not so much be about me and my thing but about God and His heart. If I want this kind of life, if I desire to be reduced down to love, then I must look at what Jesus exemplified on earth.

Jesus was concerned about people and relationship building. He took the time to talk with the outcast, downhearted and despairing ones of His day. He slowed down to the speed of love, which by contrast to what we might imagine, is a slow, often meticulous pace. Bottom line: He came for us.

This brings me to question my motivation to write. Do I write for myself or am I writing for others? Is my writing about finding my own fame or spreading the fame of His Name? These questions must be fully asked and fully answered each time I sit in front of the blinking cursor. If the words I write have anything to do with me, then the words I write are simply consonants and vowels strung together on the page, void of any real message.

I want nothing more than for the words I write to bring His Name glory and encourage the hearts that read them. Love for Christ, expressed by loving others, through a reduction of me is the key to joy. I pray for a greater desire to touch lives, love others as Jesus modeled, thus experiencing a joy that cannot fully be expressed by any typed or spoken word but lived out in a radical obedient life.