How do we practice love? And how do we tap the Christ within so that we are able to love the difficult and irksome ones? The call is even to extend love to those who have abused us—our enemies. First we must function in a higher framework. Hannah Whitall Smith in her classic The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life said, “The human beings around us are often the bottles that hold our medicine prescribed and given to us by the Great Physician of our souls to heal our spiritual diseases.”⁷⁵ Graham Cooke in his book, Approaching the Heart of Prophecy, also points us to this higher plane: “It’s not easy to love everyone, but it is the call on every prophet’s life. To test us in this, God deliberately puts people around us who are meant to be loved by us. Often we will have to be very creative to love them; some of them, by design, are not easy to love. But those unlovable ones, ironically, teach us the most about God’s heart. I call people like these grace growers. They cultivate the grace in my life by forcing me to be intentional about loving them.”⁷⁶ Cooke continues, “God puts these people in our lives to teach us about being Christlike….We all have difficult people around us, but they are going to teach us experientially how to discover and explore the love of God. It will kill us to love some of them; such struggle cracks open our heart to the Holy Spirit. God wants us to look at His children with the same love He feels. The harder they are to love, the more God will pour Himself out on us to accomplish that action. What a mystery this is! The very people we find the hardest to get along with can bring us the closest to Christ.”⁷⁷ We must know God’s ways and perceive His hand in relational struggles. We must understand that God orchestrates things such that we must enter into His death on the cross—the cross our self nature is placed on in union with Christ—and so bear about in the body death to our natural reactions. At the point of death to self, the Holy Spirit releases Christ’s resurrection life. We experience His supernatural grace in order to love. Death works life is the Scriptural principle. (See Galatians 2:20.)

Secondly, to stay unblocked we must forgive continually all day long. When God is our Need-Meeter we can absolve others. We must look to Father, Son, and Spirit to hold us close, fill us, and satisfy our hearts. Then we have real riches or spiritual resources to draw from. It’s like this, “When you forgive, you release into God’s hands the person who has offended you. You drop the offense, let it go, and give up your right to hurt the person who hurt you. Then you become a candidate for the supernatural, the peace of God that passes all understanding guards your mind, and God Himself, in His own time and in His own way, vindicates you.”⁷⁸ It helps to speak aloud until you sense that you are free and clear in your spirit, “I acquit, forgive, and release [the person] to the Lord.” In the hardest cases, such as living around verbal abusers, you can keep walls down and retaliation at bay by repeating the truth under your breath, “I forgive, I forgive, I forgive….”  Forgiveness mode must become our default mode.

What we picture also has a governing effect on our behavior toward others. Step one is to erase negative images by “casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the true knowledge of God.”⁷⁹ Then employ your imagination to see the hard people in your world as fully changed in Christ. Jesus has promised that “He will bring His work to full completion.”⁸⁰ We can by faith include pre-Christians in this. Stay mentally in the not yet; abide in the realm of faith. The Bible calls it “walking by faith and not by sight.”⁸¹

Our love must be based on practicing the presence of God and continuously drawing on His grace. We can never love with Christian love in our own strength. Because Christ dwells within, we can ask Him to give us His heart and mind regarding others. We can even walk yielded to the emotions of God. Ever greater realization of union with God facilitates greater appropriation and release of His love nature.

Email katherinefbell@icloud.com for a copy of a quite helpful doc on forgiveness.

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Blessings in return—