(Ephesians 5:1-2 MSG) Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents.  Mostly what God does is love you.  Keep company with him and learn a life of love.  Observe how Christ loved us.  His love was not cautious but extravagant.  He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us.  Love like that.

Loving like God loves presents a challenge that is difficult for us to meet and impossible for us without Jesus.  In Jesus, God gave us an example of his love.  He gave everything of himself for us.  Jesus’ death on the cross, where he took our sins upon himself, was an event in the history of our world; but his love for us has transcended history because it is eternal.  How can we love like that?

That is a hard mountain to climb.  The closer we get to God’s kind of love the rarer the air.  I mean in a world filled with hate, the more we try to love the less like the world we will become.  Loving like God loves is like common sense; it is not very common.  What are we to do?

I have found that the more I openly receive God’s love for me, the more capacity I have for loving others.  If I allow myself to experience God’s love, forgiveness, and grace, I am filled with Love, forgiveness, and grace. This grants me the confidence to pass them on to others.

 In Matthew chapter 11 verse 29 from the Message translation, we read these words of Jesus. “Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”  The unforced rhythms of grace contain peace, forgiveness, and love.  The closer we get to Jesus, and the more we learn how he does things, the more we will “love like that.”