We love, because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19
Everything! I’m late in writing this today, because I usually write it at night. But last night my heat stopped working, and with a forecast of 3 degrees overnight I knew it needed to be dealt with. I praised God that He worked in my ex-husbands and my life that we were on friendly terms, because he’s in the plumbing and heating business. When I called him early evening I apologized and assured him it just happened. Mainly because we used to get those emergency calls at night, because people either thought they could fix it themselves or wait until morning. He laughed and said he’d be right out. Although it was a quick repair, checking something else there was a leak, so he had to call out our friend, one of his employees to bring parts since his truck was well stocked. Long story short after about 2 1/2 hours all was well and I was warm again.
After they left and I had a chance to sit down in warmth, I took a minute to consider the day. For the most part it was like any other, Makiing phone calls, getting into God’s Word, studying for Sunday, enjoying the sunshine although frigid out, and grateful that I had the love of God and others in my life. I was warm and toasty thankful for heat. Then as I was working on the agenda for our Congregational Meeting I began to feel chilled. I knew the heat was on, because I could hear it running and I just had felt it’s warmth about 30 minutes ago. Finally I decided I was going to turn it up, and to my surprise the heat was running but the temp was going down. A check at the register told me it was running but not heating, the air was cool!
It made me think about our relationship with God and others. Sometimes we get so comfortable with the daily routine and taking comforts for granted, that we don’t realize it until something changes. For me it was the feeling of growing cold, even though I had a sweater on. But that unusual chill got me to get up and want to turn up the heat. I never thought about it not working. How often do we take the love of God and others for granted, like it’s just supposed to be there. And when we feel it isn’t, we just think of it as a themostat that can be looked at and just adjust. But just like my heat problem was not with the thermostat, I had to take a deeper look to find out what was truly going on. It was a loose wire by the way, but that wasn’t the only issue.
How much is our relationship with God like that? We begin to feel a coolness in our relationship with Him and we think spending a little more time praying, or reading the Bible or doing more “things” for Him will warm us up, but just doing things isn’t enough. We need to dig deeper, and seek His face and listen to His Spirit showing us what really is going on. Only then will our relationship with Him be on fire again, but it will warm up our other relationships. For as we are reminded in today’s verse, we only can truly love others when we allow God to love us first.
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