Every month, I am ever so blessed to meet with ladies in my church and talk about Jesus. The homes we meet in are always cozy, the conversation relaxed, and yet, the air always buzzes with an indescribable excitement. We laugh, we share, we craft or bake, and we deepen our love for Christ. There is no age cut off, and the only necessity is an open heart.
We decided to call this once a month meeting “Growth Group” and it’s stuck ever since. It’s one of the things I love most and am ever so passionate about. It inspires me when I see change, and to see women of all ages take deliberate steps of faith. I love watching as God uses them in incredible ways through the simplest of means.
This month, our topic of choice was “Love Revealed”. The basis being that we can not fully enjoy the blessing of love, until we love like Christ. If we harbor anything but love in our hearts, we steal blessing from ourselves. 1 John 3 wraps it up so eloquently PLUS it ties a pretty bow on it. Stop reading this and go read it now. Go. I’m serious. It’s gooooooooood stuff.
1 John 3:1 opens us with:
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”
The writer is EXCITED. See the exclamation points?! and it’s something we ALL should get excited about, we’re children of GOD and he LAVISHES His love on us. He doesn’t just sprinkle, He LAVISHES it on. I serve a BIG God, who loves BIG, and who lavishes BIG. That’s kind of a BIG deal. I want to be just like Him! I want to LOVE deeply and with great lengths! I want to be dramatically different from the world. Love was never meant to be a noun or an adjective, but a verb. We have GOT to live it out in what we DO.
One of my favorite parts of the night was when all of us ladies wrote what was on our hearts, onto paper hearts & put them into a jar. We spent a few quiet moments praying over the jar, and then we lit a match, and prayed that Christ would refine us through His flames. It’s the little things, I tell you. Something as simple as writing a burden down, and burning it can be so liberating. LOVE itself is liberating. If we JUST DO IT.
“Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”
1 John 3:18
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