Lord, I promise to love You with a holy carefreeness. I promise It will not be a measured, dosed-out thing. “Love never falls short” (1 Corinthians 13:8, author’s trans). The Pharisees’ rigid rules-and-regulations devotion was not love of You; it was love of themselves.
Love is not love unless it results in abandon. That is why Jesus highly praised Mary’s offering of perfume that she poured over His feet. A waste? Never! An abandonment! If Mary had calculated her offering to an exact dose, it would not have been love; it would have been ostentation.
“Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). If I am afraid of God, I do not love Him. When I am afraid to offend God, I am thinking of myself, not Him; therefore, my love has evaporated. Lovers of God have a characteristic childlike boldness that is all innocency. A stranger approaches a king with timid deference, while the king’s son strides into his presence.
I see now what Ezekiel’s river was (Ezekiel 47). The river flowed from the Temple with increasing depth—ankle-deep, knee-deep, loin-deep, then deep enough to swim. Lord, You want me to be a swimming Christian, abandoned to You in love so that I am carried away by it. Only twice in His earthly ministry did Jesus call attention to giving—once when the widow gave her two mites, and again when Mary emptied her jar over His feet.
The measured, careful, calculated gift is not a love action; it is a duty. How shameful to be loved out of duty! If I am concerned with niceties, I am not concerned with God, only with my reputation. Love “does not seek its own [reputation]” (1 Corinthians 13:5). I want to love You with abandon, Lord, and thus show how completely worthy You are of my love. I want to love You to shamelessness, the same kind of shamelessness that put You on a tree for me.
“And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment” (Philippians 1:9).
Daily with the King 