True love cannot exist without the power of choice. No matter what we do, we can’t make someone love us. People search for love in many ways. Some rely on desperate tactics like manipulation, control, deception. True love is not petty or manipulative. It is 100% reliant on the choice of another person. Stepping towards someone hoping that they will love you is the most humbling and vulnerable place. God didn’t create Adam and Eve as robots. He gave them a plethora of choices and warned them of what would happen if they exercised their freedom of choice regarding one tree.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat[a] of it you shall surely die.”
Genesis 2:16-17
True Love Reaches to Us
True love stands on the precipice of choice and free will. God has the power to exert complete control over us. However, our choice to walk away from God 100% belongs to us. God’s perfect love is secure, selfless, and strong enough to allow us a choice. The beauty is that His love is true love, and our choice to love Him is 100% ours. He demonstrated his love for the world by becoming a baby in a manger and then going to the cross for our power of choice. We were without the choice of forgiveness, relationship with Him, and heaven since the Garden of Eden. His true love put that choice back into all of our hands. This is the perfect season to meditate on God’s love coming to us.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10
“He speaks to us now with a still, small voice,
The Holy Sound, stanza 5
As He waits for us to make a choice.
He gently and meekly bids us to come;
His love is for all; no one is shunned.”
