8374	Forums / Main Forum / The Bible On Trial	on: October 07, 2006, 06:04:18 AM
Love is a commitment. But love comes from God. Every act of love has its source in God. God is so big that the more we know Him the more we will love. When we are saved love becomes more than a commitment thing tho. God actually communicates to us through love. He shows us as a Father that He loves us. We are in His covenant of love. In His covenant He has promised to keep us and bring us through all of our trials , so that we become more like His Son. He has shown us who He is by His law, and He has required us to obey Him. He has signed that covenant with us in the blood of the sacrifice of His Son and sprinkled that blood of obedience on us. So we are loved eternally. When we hear His voice through His word we are changed from thinking that we earn His love by our performance to knowing He loves us because we could never act rite. When we understand the covenant of grace we know that we are representatives of His name so that being in a relationship with Him , He will uphold us, sustain us, keep us safe, forgive us, grant us grace, show us that He is all powerful etc... Knowing that we are completely surrounded by Gods all encompassing grace and mercy we are able to love others. When we take Gods name in our salvation we begin to know our Father through that covenant relationship. All of our lives are focused on our Fathers love through covenant. When we meet someone who our Father has made for us to be our mate we begin to share that love with them. We covenant with them to love them as our Father has love us. He decides when to bring that person to us in marriage. The natural out flow of a covenant relationship is to long to be united  in the marriage covenant. Because we have so many experiences where God has love us in covenant we understand what unconditional love is. Because God is our high tower we can have a sense that we are over our circumstances, that we are loved beyond any other being we encounter. Now we can relax and understand who we are, and in being able to comprehend that we can become one in marriage. Now we share in a covenant of marriage. That covenant is so important to us because we have experienced our Fathers covenant love, by Him communicating to us absolute power, sovereignty, glory, and truth. He communicates this to us through His faithfulness to love us. When two people grasp Gods covenant love, they are able to rise above the circumstances of life, and love one another beyond those circumstances. Gods covenant love is all consuming. They know that God would never leave them, or cheat them. Covenant love becomes a seriously holy union. Any breaking of the covenant in marriage would create serious consequences. Both husband and wife in covenant are a picture of our Fathers love that shadows our lives in absolute security. Being in covenant is the most spiritually secure place in the universe. We may go through many trials, but through the Holy Spirit we experience Gods love in a very strong way. Because God shows us our humanness through our trials and He show us His special love in bring us through the trials. He wants us to have full confidence in Him even in the most severe trial. He wants us to rest in Christ. He creates in us a disposition that causes us to be over come with His love, by communicating it to us in our pain through the Holy Spirit and the word. When we go through the pain of marriage, and we are confronted with the word flesh and the devil, we get through this world by getting a sense of Gods love, a beauty of His love. We know by that sense that we are loved, so that it can become a weighty sense. That glory of God is what opens up to us eternity life. We are raised above this world in our thoughts, motives, loves. We begin to long for Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father. We long for His beauty. We begin to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. His Spirit witnesses with our Spirit and we are assured of His love. That spiritual sense carries us through our trials. So much of marriage is feeding off of the spiritual riches of this table. When two people eat at this table , they become living sacrifices. Marriage becomes ministry, and their children become covenant children who grow up to feel the weight of that glory.