Part One

The ultimate reality is that the Creator, the three Persons of the Trinity that are One, is love. God not only is love, but He loves—He continually gives of Himself. He is “always working, He never stops working” as the familiar worship song goes. And God’s actions toward us define love:

“This is love. He loved us long before we loved Him. It was His love, not ours. He proved it by sending His Son to be the pleasing sacrificial offering to take away our sins.” (1 John 4:9-10 TPT)

Jesus’ disciples who are seeking to walk as His bridal counterpart will flow in agape. The bride will experience the first commandment. This company of followers will know God intimately and so will respond with the supreme commandment: “You are to love the Lord Yahweh, your God, with a passionate heart, from the depths of your soul, with your every thought, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30 TPT) They will demonstrate the power and purity of the selfless love of God as they will function out of their one spirit relationship with Christ within. “But if you give yourself to the Lord, you and Christ are joined together as one person,” I Corinthian 6:17 reveals. (TLB) That was Paul’s secret. The apostle so lived out being one with the Lord that he and Jesus shared one living. Christ was his life. The bride will know who they are in the earth. As a major part of their identity, these ones in union with the heart of God will say like John the Beloved, “I am ‘the disciple whom Jesus dearly loves.’” (John 15:23 TPT) 

Anyone can be a part of the Bride company. All it takes is agreement from the heart with Song of Songs 4:6, “I will go to the mountaintop with You—the mountain of suffering love (or myrrh) and the hill of burning incense (symbol of communion in prayer). Yes I will be Your bride.” (TPT) The whole Song depicts the progression of this Divine romance. 

What does this Bridal company know of God’s love for her that results in this abandonment? What are they grounded in that yields such surrender? They have partaken of the fellowship that exists between the three Persons who are One: the way they [always and ever] burn with perfect love for each other. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in wholehearted love for one another. The three Persons burn with fiery love. The bride knows from the Word that God loves His people the way God loves God and that she is created to dwell with the Lord experiencing their fiery love. Jesus said, “I love each of you with the same love that the Father loves Me. You must continually let my love nourish your hearts. If you keep my commands, you will live (or abide) in My love, for I continually live nourished and empowered by His (the Father’s) love.” (John 15:9-10 TPT) Jesus came to reveal the Father’s love for us. The Father loves us as much as He loves Jesus. We are His seed like Jesus is. Jesus also said, “I have revealed to them [the disciples]who You are and I will continue to make You even more real to them, so that they may experience the same endless love that You have for Me, for Your love will now live in them, even as I live in them!” (John 17:26 TPT)

From reading the Word holding this vantage point and times of knowing and being known of God in our prayer closet, we put our roots deep into agape. We gain the revelation that we are unconditionally loved and accepted by our Maker because He sees us as His masterpiece or artwork. [See Eph. 2:10.] We are already an approved finished work though we are yet a work in progress. He sees us as flawless. [See Song of Songs 4:7 TPT.) The Godhead’s full attention and involvement in our lives mark the details of our days. Through increasing intimacy with the Lord of love, we come to trust that He is taking us from one higher level of glory to another. We then let go of all the world’s conditioning and only let the Bible and the lives of obedient brothers and sisters shape us. I John 3:1-3 speaks of our Divine sonship or re-creation after Jesus the Pattern Son. “Look with wonder at the depth of the Father’s marvelous love that He has lavished on us! He has called us and made us His very own beloved children. The reason the world doesn’t recognize who we are is that they didn’t recognize Him. Beloved, we are God’s children right now; however, it is not yet apparent what we will become. But we do know that when it is finally made visible, we will be just like Him, for we will see Him as He truly is. And all who focus their hope on Him will always be purifying themselves, just as Jesus is pure.” (TPT)

As there are significant breakings and dealings along the narrow road, we must keep our eyes on where Jesus is taking us and the Spirit’s full supply of grace to make us overcomers. The Holy Spirit works to remove all the effects of the curse inherited from the fall. (See John 14:16-17 with footnotes TPT.) We mustn’t get offended at God’s leadership. After all, He is a perfect leader who Himself was perfected through suffering. The bride sees that the Bible, our eternal covenant with God, reveals a God who always acts toward His people in love. His wisdom, power and judgments only express His love nature. He is sovereign and moves to deliver us from all that hinders being restored to the union with Himself and the fulfillment of His fiery love He longs for us to know.  

The Bride will be able to love others as she loves herself. And Christ’s people will love themselves with God’s love or in the grace of God. Gone will be any failure to accept the way God made us. No one will harbor traces of self-rejection. And shame, dealt with on the cross, will have no place. God’s embrace and God’s verdict of our worth now prevails. We will know how He feels about us—the passion that led Him to pay the highest price on the cross. Our experience in Him will be that we are His nourished and cherished beloved ones. God will put in us levels of His love for others such that we will be compelled by agape to lay down our lives for others as He laid down His life for us. Jesus lives to make intercession for us, and we will continually call on God for the Body and the ones who need His redemption. We will “pray for one another that ye [the whole Body] may be healed.” (James 5:16 KJV) 1 Corinthians 13 realities will characterize the Bride. 

Part Two

To walk out 1 Corinthians 13, God must be our source. “Anyone who does not demonstrate righteousness and show love to fellow believers is not living with God as his source,” 1 John 3:10 states outrightly. (TPT) This directive calls for ever being on the receiving end of God’s love. “Those who are loved by God, let his love continually pour from you to one another, because God is love. Everyone who loves is fathered by God and experiences an intimate knowledge of Him. The one who doesn’t love has yet to know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8 TPT)

God knows that the call to love can entail a steep climb. The way forward is through the Song of Songs and keeping in the heart the vision of where He is taking us. The King of kings declares in the Song: “O my beloved, you are lovely. When I see you in your beauty, I see a radiant city where we will dwell as one. More pleasing than any pleasure, more delightful than any delight….” (Song of Songs 6:4 TPT). We actually ravish Jesus Christ’s heart when we gaze at Him with cooperation or surrender. 

The way to perfection in love is found in chapter 8 of the Song: “Fasten me [the Bridegroom King Jesus] upon your heart as a seal of fire forevermore. This living, consuming flame will seal you as My prisoner of love. Everything [that is of the carnal nature] will be consumed. It will stop at nothing as you yield everything to this furious fire until it won’t even seem to you like a sacrifice anymore.” (Song of Songs 8:6-7 TPT)

Paul found the way to be able to love selflessly. He loved others with the affections of Jesus or out of His interior fellowship with the tender inward parts of Christ. He heart became soft through His pursuit of knowing Jesus. He wrote down his heart for the church in Philippians:

It is only natural that I should feel like this about you all—you are very dear to me. For during the time I was in prison as well as when I was out defending and demonstrating the power of the Gospel we shared together the grace of God. God knows how much I long, with the deepest Christian love and affection, for your companionship. My prayer for you is that you may have still more love—a love that is full of knowledge and wise insight. I want you to be able always to recognise the highest and the best, and to live sincere and blameless lives until the day of Jesus Christ. I want to see your lives full of true goodness, produced by the power that Jesus Christ gives you to the praise and glory of God. (Phil. 1:7-11 PHILLIPS)

We can share such a heart for one another only if Galatians 2:20 becomes our watchword and instrument of deliverance from the selfish flesh nature. Paul lived a life under or subject to the cross. His walk is the model for the Christian walk. Paul let Jesus live and love through him: “So I am not the one living now—it is Christ living in me. I still live in my body, but I live by faith in the Son of God. He is the one who loved me and gave himself to save me.” (Gal. 2:20 ERV)

And John restates later in his letter that “God is love. Those who are living in love are living in God, and God lives through them. By living in God, love has been brought to its full expression in us so that we may fearlessly face the day of judgment, because all that Jesus now is, so are  we in this world.” (1 John 4:16-17 TPT) We will have no fear in these last days. The Body will match the Head as we attain the fullness of the call to be Christians— “little Christs.” We will be “made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18 KJV)

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Blessings in return—