“Therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma”. (Ephesians 5:1,2)
You are to follow God as dear children, to be obedient to all His requirements, walking in love as Christ also has loved us. Love was the element in which Christ moved and walked and worked. He came to embrace the world in the arms of His love.
We are to follow the example set by Christ, and make Him our pattern, until we shall have the same love for others as He has manifested for us. He seeks to impress us with this profound lesson of love. If your hearts have been given to selfishness, let Christ imbue you with His love. He desires that we shall love Him fully, and encourages, yes, even commands, that we shall love others as He has given us an example. He has made love the badge of our discipleship. This is the measurement to which you are to reach, “Love one another; as I have loved you.” What height, what depth and breadth of love! This love is not simply to embrace a few favorites, it is to reach to the lowliest and humblest of God’s creatures. Jesus says, “In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
The love and sympathy which Jesus would have us give to others does not savor of sentimentalism, which is a snare to the soul; it is a love that is of heavenly extraction, which Jesus exemplifies by both precept and example. But instead of manifesting this love, how often we are alienated and estranged one from another. The result is estrangement from God, a dwarfed experience, a blighting of Christian growth.
The love of Jesus is an active principle, uniting heart with heart in bonds of Christian fellowship. Everyone who enters heaven will on earth have been perfected in love; for in heaven the Redeemer and the redeemed will be objects of our interest.
Ellen G. White
From Sons and Daughters of God, May 20
