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Thursday, April 23, 2015

Pastoral Pings (Plus) ~ Exulting and Exalting the Love of Jesus Christ


          It began with a collection of words that all began with the same letter. For some reason, I like it when the points derived from a Scripture can be expressed in that way. Perhaps this makes it easier to remember.
          Whatever the case, this morning began with the recognition that all the things I am learning of the joyful love-relationships of the church leave me with these e-words: experience, enjoy, and express.
          Experience: it is clear from God’s word that he wants all his children to experience the love of God that is given to us in Jesus Christ.[1] We are the beloved children of God,[2]and God wants us to know it, to feel it, to experience it.[3]
          Enjoy: it is just as clear that our experience of the love of God given through Christ, and expressed through the apostles and prophets of the early church, is to be enjoyable. Jesus spoke the truth in love for our joy.[4] Paul worked for our joy.[5] John wrote of the apostles’ experience of Christ to bring the church into fellowship with them and God in order to complete our joy.[6] Everything given to us in Christ, through the foundation-laying lives and ministries of the apostles and prophets,[7] was aimed at bringing us to enjoy the joy that God and his servants have in the children of God.
          Express: in the same way as branches receive the sap of the vine for their own good, and pass that sap on to the further reaches of branches, buds, blossoms, and fruit, so the believer in Jesus Christ receives the love of God in such a way that we can only continue enjoying the experience if we keep passing it on to others. There is no such thing as a Christian being loved by God in a dead-end  kind of way. The love of God must flow through our lives to give that non-ending experience of joyful love.
          This three-word (e-word) summary of the joyful love relationships of the church invited two other e-words to join the fellowship. When we experience, enjoy, and express the joyful love relationships of the church, we find ourselves both exulting in the love of Jesus Christ, and exalting the love of Jesus Christ.
          Exulting: exulting in the joyful love of God that is in Jesus and his church is to have such enjoyable experience of the love of Christ that we personally overflow with joy. Exulting is something that happens inside us. We feel happiness over what we have. We feel joy and gladness and delight in what we have. We overflow with testimony of the love of God. We find ourselves writing and speaking in long sentences of delight and wonder because we just cannot find enough words to describe what the joy and love and peace and delight feel like.
          Exalting: at the same time, our exulting experience of enjoying the love relationships of God and his people cause us to exalt the joyful love of God that accomplishes such things as this. Paul had been an angry and violent young man who was intent on destroying the church because he could not believe that this Jesus of Nazareth could be the Jewish Messiah. However, Jesus grabbed hold of his life so dramatically, raising him from the dead condition of his sin, and appointing him to apostolic leadership in the church, that we exalt the joyful love of God that would do this for such a man as him. At the same time, we exalt the greatness of the joyful love relationships that come through the love of God that would make Paul the man who teaches us to love the brotherhood of believers!
          Whether or not these five e-words make this easier to remember, God’s love brings us into the most joyful love relationships ever. They are ours to experience, to enjoy, and to express to others. They are ours to exult in as our own personal place in the joyful love relationships of our home in Jesus Christ, and they are ours to exalt as the gracious gift of the God who is love.
          For myself, my journey through God’s word this last couple of months has caused me to experience the joyful love relationships of God and his people more than ever before. I find myself feeling greater enjoyment of what I mean to God, what the whole brotherhood of believers means to the apostles and prophets who became the foundation for the church, and what we mean to each other in the present-day  generation of the body of Christ. I also find myself desiring to express joyful love relationship to the entire brotherhood of believers, no matter whether they live in my home, attend my home church, fellowship in other locations, or suffer in other parts of our world.
          The fact is that my exulting in the joyful love relationships of God and his people is growing, and so I find myself all the more eager to exalt the love of God before your eyes, and before your heart, so that you feel the invitation of God who “…so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”[8]

© 2015 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)



[1] Philippians 1:9-11; Philippians 2:1; Jude 1:21
[2] Ephesians 5:1
[3] Ephesians 3:14-21
[4] John 15:11
[5] II Corinthians 1:24; Philippians 1:25
[6] I John 1:3-4
[7] Ephesians 2:19-22
[8] John 3:16

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