John 15:10–If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

Think about what it means to abide in someone’s love?  The “want to” speaks to the security, comfort, and peace that we first define that love to be, before we ever think to abide or remain in it.  Such love not only has to be trustworthy, but continually established for us to abide or remain in it…

So what does it say about the Word, that Jesus in the passage above desires for us to commit ourselves to?  In Jesus’ desire for us to abide in His Love, He vouches for the Word to be “the bridge”, in order for us to experience Him in the same way He experiences the love of the Father.  But is the sacrifice Jesus makes in submitting to the Father worth it?

Faith will always challenge us to give up what we are currently abiding in for security, comfort, and peace, for God to be the ultimate Provider of all those things.  To abide or “remain” in God sometimes is to do so, when everything else in our senses tells us not to.  But that is the point, to grow us out of seeking circumstantial comfort, to experiencing the comfort of abiding in God’s love in obedience to His Word.

Abiding in God will always carry with it an element of discomfort, because it doesn’t resonate with what we normally look for when wanting to abide in love.  We generally look to people; spouses, friends, family, etc.  Yet we find ourselves disappointed when we do so, because we want the same trustworthy, unerring faithfulness that God and His Word promises!

Fight to prioritize the desire to abide in love with God, and allow people to either confirm God’s love in your life, or be challenged by it.  But never try and replace them to be like God’s love.  When we prioritize Jesus, we will inevitably spend time in God’s Word while empowered to walk in it.  We will then experience the trustworthiness of Christ through His Word, that we cannot fathom being without Him…

In His Love, Ld