When the fire of love burns within the heart, you always want to share it. When you understand how many blessings love brings into life, an irresistible desire arises to tell people about it, persuade them to enter this path, and describe the wonderful experiences agape brings. After all, the only thing better than love is the love you receive for new victories and blessings. I cannot live upon the experiences of former days. I always need fresh love seasoned with Heavenly salt.
But the problem is that I have already grown in love. I know what it is, how it works within me, and how I love. Yet to the listener with whom I am trying to share my happiness, I may seem like a foreigner attempting to teach higher mathematics in an unfamiliar language.
When I tell those around me about love, I watch their interest in the subject very carefully. As a friend, I expect my joy and delight to be transmitted to my listeners and for them to experience a special blessing from such light. But then I remember that growth in love has its own principles and timing, which I cannot accelerate. I must be patient and continue sowing the seed.
The Lord leads me onward into new depths of love and prompts me to write them down so that readers may understand where they are going and know what happiness awaits them as they come to know agape and develop it within their minds.
The mind does not comprehend the depth of revelations immediately. An elementary school student cannot solve problems in higher mathematics, but he moves confidently toward that ability, growing from one solution to the next.
The language of love is understood by everyone, and everyone experiences it. But the depth of knowledge is revealed only by God at the time the Lord has appointed for each diligent student.
Loving one another contains something that cannot be described in words but can be experienced. We become God’s blessing to one another, enriching each other without bringing sorrow with us. The Heavenly gold of love can adorn both my life and my friend’s life. I become rich in love when I withdraw it from the Heavenly bank in order to give it away and enrich my friend with it. He is enriched by my loving attitude toward him, storing within his heart my attention, kind words, joy that I am present in his life, and my delight in him. He enjoys the wonderful touch of God’s agape as it passes through my heart, carrying a part of me so that it may become a part of him.
In response to such an attitude, my friend does the same. He connects to Heaven’s endless resources in order to enrich the storehouses of my soul with his heartfelt affection, tenderness, the healing balm of gentle words, and Heavenly tones, assuring me that my love has found a response within his soul and has been accepted forever into his mind.
Then we share with one another the very wealth we have received from each other, each trying to prove to his friend that the friend is better than he is and is the most wonderful person in the world. Through this, each of us becomes even richer.
All this leads us, out of the abundance of love within our hearts, to begin enriching our dear Savior through joyful exclamations, inspired prayers of thanksgiving, uplifting songs, and a feeling of jubilation over the friend we have been given. I believe Jesus takes great pleasure in becoming rich through our love for one another. He joyfully helps us understand that this is only the beginning of eternal relationships that will continue developing and deepening without end, bringing even greater joy.
If loving one another can already fill us with delight and happiness now, I can only imagine what all this will be like in Eternity!
I am simply describing the experience in which I live. I know with certainty that if I was able to attain it, you can as well.
If relationships like these are present within your family, you are rightly the happiest of families. But remember that the family cannot be the foundation or building material of happiness, because death may separate you unexpectedly.
But if love is present, it will adorn every relationship and even true happiness founded upon Christ.
The Lord expects this boundless spirit of loving one another not to restrict us to only one friend or spouse. Rather, within the boundaries of God’s law and Christian ethics, this quality of the soul should belong to all my friends.
A friend’s unconditional love frees my mind from every kind of stereotype, removes the barriers of the heart, and opens access to treasures within my soul of which even I am unaware.
The Lord asks me to call unto Him, and He will show me great and mighty things that I do not know (Jeremiah 33:3). He has many mysteries that He reveals to those who call upon Him, and one of these mysteries is my own self. Only a friend who loves me can uncover this mystery. My friend’s heart unites with Jesus in love for me, and in this union they attack me, pouring their agape upon me, breaking the rusty chains of fears and stereotypes, and pouring the healing balm of love and friendly concern into my heart. Wielding the shovel of agape, my friend, with God’s help, uncovers talents and treasures within me that I never even suspected were there. I had no idea what was stored within my heart until my friend’s love discovered this wealth of the soul. He speaks these things aloud to me. I am afraid to believe them, yet I understand that they are true. All of it was within me but inaccessible to me. It awaited that particular friend who, with the help of his love, could dig it up, see it, and present it to the world as a masterpiece of God’s grace, inspiring admiration and wonder in those around us.
If I had decided to extract all this myself, I would have been ridiculed as an empty braggart. But my friend’s love made his discoveries within me beautiful and true.
I, in turn, do not sit idly by. I explore my friend’s heart and, with God’s help, show him the great and mighty things he does not know about himself. Our joy in discovering one another has no limit. We love one another. We are explorers in the realm of the closed heart. We become physicians of the soul.
Other friends whom Jesus brings into my life discover new treasures within me of which I also know nothing. At the same time, they allow me to love them and make amazing discoveries within them.
All this exists within love and friendship, and everyone who learns the science of love while maintaining an eternal transaction with Christ will grow to this point. Heaven desires to become rich through our love, and someday Jesus’ dream that we will love one another will come true.
And He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied.
He who abides in love for his friend abides in God, and God in him.
The first loving friend may not appear immediately. Yet my love for people will not remain unnoticed, and a friend will decide to take the risk and dare to love me. This travail of his soul will be rewarded with a wonderful experience of mutual love and pure friendship that will bring joy to our hearts throughout life.
Love does not grow weary. It does no harm to another person. It does not risk becoming a curse. It crushes sin and opens a more excellent way.
The Faithful Witness counsels us to buy this gold from Him so that we ourselves may become rich and enrich all Heaven with the interest of our praise.
Bible Verses for Reflection
Proverbs 10:22; 12:25; 17:17; 24:26; 25:15; 27:9; Ecclesiastes 10:12; 12:11; John 13:34–35; Revelation 3:18; Joshua 21:44–45; Psalm 103:1–5; 1 John 1:7; 4:7–13; Galatians 5:6; Ephesians 4:11–16; Acts 1:14; 2:1, 46.