Overflowing Pitchers

  

     Before the birth of my second daughter I wondered if I would have enough love to give another child. The love I felt for my firstborn was so immense and intense, I had a hard time imagining having the same love for my second. I needn’t have worried. The moment she was born I found my heart expanding to accommodate another precious little girl, and eventually, a baby boy as well.
    Love, I discovered, is a self-propagating force. The more I give away, the more there is to give; it is never used up. William Shakespeare’s Juliet expressed this to her Romeo:
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”
    Infinite love is found only in God. He is the creator, propagator and source of  all beneficial love. “Dear friends,” the apostle John wrote, “Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”  (1 John 4:7-8)
    As finite beings it is hard for us to imagine never running out of love, but God has a reason for giving us such a limitless resource; He wants us to lovingly care for one another. When we experience the love of God in our lives, we find we cannot contain it in our lowly vessel; it is going to overflow. If our hearts have been truly changed by Christ’s indwelling spirit, then He fills us up with so much love we cannot help but splash it onto others.
    Human love tends to have an element of give and take to it. When we love someone, we desire and even expect to be loved back. When love is God-prompted it comes with no expectations but to bless the receiver. The scriptural Greek word for that kind of love is agape. Pastor and author John MacArthur says biblical agape love is not an emotion but a disposition of the heart to seek the welfare and meet the needs of others. We have no capacity to generate agape love on our own. The love of God is only unquenchable when allowed to flow through the channel of a yielded Christ-follower. Edward T. Welch writes, “Our goal is to love people more than need them. We are overflowing pitchers, not leaky cups.”
    This is the kind of love needed to give up family and home to travel to an impoverished country and minister to orphaned children and HIV/AIDS victims.
    This is the kind of love sustaining an inner-city pastor whose congregation consists of drug addicts and prostitutes.
   This is the kind of love we need when our mates disappoint us, our children ignore us, and our friends hurt us.
   This is the kind of love which flowed from the veins of Jesus Christ as He sacrificed His life so we might know forgiveness and eternity in heaven.


This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. - 1 John 3:16