Open Love
Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. Proverbs 27:6
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel. Proverbs 12:15
God intends for us to experience love.
We were created as an overflowing expression of His desire. The hope of love is to be loved in return. This God who loves us utterly is also the God who is intimately acquainted with all of our ways, who knows every thought and intent of our hearts, for whom all things are laid open and bare.
What we whisper in secret is as loud to Him as if it were shouted from the rooftops. Rather than being blind to all our faults and shortcomings, God in His love knows them all. And He is not content to merely overlook them. The marvelous paradox is that He forgives them and urges us to change them all at the same time. Whom He loves, He corrects and instructs.
Our relationships with one another within the Body of Christ are meant to mirror our relationship with God. The Bible links the two inseparably. Thus, the Lord bids us to invite others’ loving scrutiny of our hearts. He wants us to become vulnerable to those who first demonstrate that they will not violate our vulnerability. Some points of hurt and loss in our own thoughts, feelings or choices cannot be seen by ourselves alone. We need others to look into our lives to affirm what God has planted there, and to draw attention to the hidden poisons placed there by our flesh or by the enemy.
Either we are vulnerable and open to the loving examination of other saints, or we are vulnerable and open to deception. No individual can steer a straight course all the time. All we, like sheep, keep going astray.
These last weeks have brought considerable challenge and confrontation in my life; trusted, respected friends (who I know love me) have cautioned me about tendencies, discerned points of bondage in my life, urged me to question certain actions, and made definite statements about who the Lord is making me to be. I was initially surprised, then convinced that each of them had correctly identified things of death in my personality. Ah, to be loved and wounded by such friends gives me confidence to plow ahead with renewed vigor.
We have all had bad experiences with oversensitive or vengeful people taking weaknesses or failures or hurts in our lives and turning them into daggers to thrust back into our soul. But the truth is that God wants us to be so loved that our inner heart will open of its own volition like a flower responding to the light and warmth of others’ love.
