Christ in me..

"So we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us." 1 John 4:16

Lately, I have been feeling a little bit discouraged and worn out. I've been praying this past year for God to lead me to people with soft hearts. He has answered that prayer by opening my eyes to people that he has been working on. It's been awesome and really exciting but I have found myself in a place where I have been trying to love people by my own strength, which is why I have been feeling overwhelmed. So I have been going back to the love of God and clinging to that truth. I've been thinking about this verse and how if we really knew and really believed that God loved us in more ways than we could imagine..that we are chosen, accepted, pursued, reconciled, saved, forgiven, pure, rejoiced over, loved, approved and appointed, how would that change our lives? How much freedom would that give us?

How can we experience this love? In 1 John 4:12 it says, "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."
Gods love is perfected in us when we love one another. But the thing is, he never intended us to do it alone. In fact, we can't love anyone alone because without God it is impossible to love. God is love. His love is perfected when he abides in us and through him, we can love one another.

Another great verse from this chapter that I've been thinking about is 1 John 4:9-10. It says "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

Yes, one of the reasons that Christ came to this earth is to save us from our sins, so that we may have eternal life. But another reason according to this verse is so that "we might live through him". If we are constantly living by the spirit, we can do "immeasureable more than we can ask or imagine according to the power that is at work within us." Eph 3:20