Talking with God this morning, He revealed something to me about love and lust, about why I am afraid to fall in love, about why I will always be afraid to fall in love until I realize what love really is.
Love is about loving everybody but finding your identity in no one but God.
When we find our identity in things other than Him, we are claiming our independence. We are finding our importance in things that are not important in the least. Independence is dangerous because it is almost a claim that we, in a way, are God, that we can be important apart from Him. This is what happened with the fall. God gave Adam and Eve free will, just as He gives each of us free will. But they chose to imprison themselves and become indepent rather than listening to God and choosing open and undefiled relationship with Him.
We have this choice every day: to find our identity in other things; addictions, people, sin, or to find it solely in Him. We feel that claiming responsibility for our lives and living according to our wants is in some way stronger than giving everything to God.
The problem is that we have not been made in the image of other things. We were not made to be like cigarettes, food, animals. We were made in the image of the One who created us, to live apart from our desires, and yet still recognize that we have them. We are to make war against the things that try to steal us away from Him. Because when we focus our attention, find our identity, in other things, there is a disconnect that happens. We lose sight of who we were made to be. And the more we lose sight of it, the more we will try to find it in other places, trying to fill the void with the very things that are creating it.
True happiness and peace comes with true connection. True freedom comes with giving up all of our rights to the one who gave them to us. We are to trust that He knows us beter than we know ourselves. We are to love with abandon, without fear of consequence, without fear at all, because perfect love drives out all fear.
The odd thing is that we are much more free after we admit that we are in chains and let God have the key.
Finding our identity in Him alone, we begin to find ourselves everywhere we look, because any place we are, there He is.I used to be afraid of being loved. I still struggle with it, actually. But God is giving me a new definition and meaning towards the idea and the feeling of being loved. Only He can love me as intended, and as I need.
