A simple recipe to love well | Pathways to God's presence

<p>Today we are tackling some big topics in our Pathways to God’s Presence series. Our focus is on what God calls us to do, and specifically how we are called to do it. We are not going to emphasize trying harder or striving deeper or hustling a bit longer. These are not pathways to the presence of God. These are the counterfeit ways of the world to trick you into exhaustion, dryness and uselessness and then defeat when we finally realize it was a dead end.We are free to choose – God’s way of patience, waiting, praying, trusting, or the world’s way of hustling. It is truly our choice. We have that much freedom and power.  And the truly wise will choose the pathways of God. Love and humility and surrender in joyful obedience are the hallmarks of the believer’s fullness of life.  Now, If love requires freewill then humility requires freewill too. Love is a choice, and in the same way humility is a choice. Jesus role-modeled both for us when He left heaven for earth.</p> <p>The last act of the will is surrender to God. Humility is surrender of our will to God. As you have probably heard us say before here on GSP, the voluntary loss of our freewill and our free choice to the will of God is our ultimate act of love and the proof of our growing humility.</p> <p>You can’t measure your growth in humility but you can measure your growth in genuinely other-centered love and it’s connected. Genuine Love is the visible manifestation of authentic humility. We know that Love is one of God’s most essential characteristics, which means God is the most humble Being. We are made in His image and are never happier than when we are behaving from the identity He created us to have. It follows that love and humility go hand in hand in our very being too.</p> <p>We are looking at Prayer in the form of intercession and supplication in this episode. We ponder the prayers of Paul and of Jesus as inspiration to pray for others and for ourselves. That is the power of Scripture at your fingertips to alter eternity and change the course of pe