Love is Living 4

<p>25th February 2021</p> <p>Thank God for today, it’s another lovely Thursday and we thank God for what he’s doing in our lives.</p> <p>We’re still talking about love and the fact that Love is Living. When we allow the Person of love live in us and we allow Him flow through us, that is what love is living is all about, it is allowing love flow from the inside of us to our neighbours, to our friends, to those around us and even to our enemies. It is by doing this that we see the power of love and the ability of love to change lives begin to really be unleashed.</p> <p>Yesterday we spoke about the fact that love is giving today we want to talk about the forgiving dimension of love. Love is not just giving, Love is Forgiving. True love forgives people and we must learn to forgive people. In what we popularly call the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray “…forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us…” From time to time we will offend ourselves, from time to time we’ll do wrong, maybe knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, but we must make it a point of duty to forgive people. You know what Jesus said? If you don’t forgive others, neither will you receive forgiveness. (Matt.6:15)</p> <p>One of my mentors told me many years ago about a lesson he learnt from his own mentors, he called it the law of advance forgiveness, and what is the law of advanced forgiveness? It is the ability to think of the worst thing a person can to you and you think of how you’d respond. If yours response is not consistent with that of love and forgiveness, re-condition yourself, simulate that situation to the point where you can respond with forgiveness. That’s what the law of advanced forgiveness is all about. Forgiveness can be difficult, sometimes very painful, but if we really want to live in love we must forgive.</p> <p>You remember the story of the lost son in Luke chapter 15, he came to his father after he had messed up everything and with everything he did, the father still forgave him. Again, there’s a story in John chap