Love bears all things [regardless of what comes], believes all things [looking for the best in each one], hopes all things [remaining steadfast during difficult times], endures all things [without weakening]. Love never fails [it never fades nor ends].
And now there remain: faith [abiding trust in God and His promises], hope [confident expectation of eternal salvation], love [unselfish love for others growing out of God’s love for me], these three [the choicest graces]; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:7,8,13 (AMP)
LOVE
It is easily the #1 subject of the scriptures. Where the Bible is not talking about it directly, Love is continually in the backdrop, constantly in the forefront, and always between the lines... a immovable presence in which the Larger Story has both its profound meaning and its ongoing invitation in which to be experienced; tasted and seen.
How can a page on a web site do Love justice? It can’t. After all, Love is in all the stories we tell, the books we write, the films we watch... because it is in our story and Love is the longing and desire of our hearts that we carry with us from the day we land in this great story.
Love is everything!
Love made us... and Love is what we were made for and it doesn’t take long to discover that Love is most violently opposed, falsely twisted and sinisterly used ingredient in our story. Oh yes, there is a kingdom of darkness set against us experiencing the very thing that would set us free.
Look at wounding, hurt and pain and you see hate (opposite of love), lust (twisted love) and maybe the worst of all, conditional love; the brutal false or shallow kind of masquerading love that would declare, "I would love you if...", and IF there is one thing we don’t need any more of… it's conditional love.
God is Love (1 John 4:8) and where there is love there is God. There is no love without God, whether He is acknowledged or not. The Trinity is in a fellowship of love, committed to love and bound by a love in which to rescue, redeem, restore and set free! That which God loves, the image bearers of God, sets the whole story in motion; the restoration of all things.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:12
It is love our hearts long for because we were made that way and it is Love that longs for us because God is that way. Give our hearts to anything else as our primary supplier of love and we will sooner or later drain the source. It was C. S. Lewis who wrote…
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
But with God, the depths of his love are unfathomable… just what we need, love freely and abundantly offered by the Father through the Son and sealed by the Spirit. More and more and more.
As his creatures, those unique in creation bearing his image when we are being loved we are clearly most happy, as anything is most happy when it is experiencing that for which it was made. When we are experiencing God’s love… we come alive.
Love is the offer of the Larger Gospel, and when received, experienced, enjoyed… love settles us. Love is what fuels Life that we might have it abundant and to the full (John 10:10).
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39
The ingredients of Love are pretty simple: validation, acceptance, worth, belonging and significance. These are the things every heart longs for and hopes for. It is our prayer you are experiencing this Love… experiencing God. It is our team’s goal and mission to offer what we are experiencing. We deeply hope to provide environments where you can experience the intimacy, oneness and connectedness with God that you were made for, not just once or once in a while but again and again so that you will never be the same... again, and again, and again. This is the more.