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Spontaneous Love |
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Love suffers long and is kind . . . —1 Corinthians 13:4 |
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| Love is not
premeditated— it is spontaneous; that is, it bursts forth in extraordinary
ways. There is nothing of precise certainty in Paul’s description of love.
We cannot predetermine our thoughts and actions by saying, "Now I will never
think any evil thoughts, and I will believe everything that Jesus would have
me to believe." No, the characteristic of love is spontaneity. We don’t
deliberately set the statements of Jesus before us as our standard, but when
His Spirit is having His way with us, we live according to His standard
without even realizing it. And when we look back, we are amazed at how
unconcerned we have been over our emotions, which is the very evidence that
real spontaneous love was there. The nature of everything involved in the
life of God in us is only discerned when we have been through it and it is
in our past. The fountains from which love flows are in God, not in us. It is absurd to think that the love of God is naturally in our hearts, as a result of our own nature. His love is there only because it "has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit . . ." ( Romans 5:5 ). If we try to prove to God how much we love Him, it is a sure sign that we really don’t love Him. The evidence of our love for Him is the absolute spontaneity of our love, which flows naturally from His nature within us. And when we look back, we will not be able to determine why we did certain things, but we can know that we did them according to the spontaneous nature of His love in us. The life of God exhibits itself in this spontaneous way because the fountains of His love are in the Holy Spirit. |