To love Him is to trust Him. To trust Him is to have faith in Him - faith that moves mountains. It is then and only then that the heart receives its desires.
One of the steps involved in cultivating the fruit of love toward the heavenly Father is to develop sight of God. In other words, a believer needs to sharpen his vision of the Father and thereby become more enlightened as to His personal attributes:
"Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour" (Eph. 5:1-2).
Imitators Of Jesus
According to these scriptures, we are to be imitators of God and walk in love just as Jesus walked in love toward us. To walk in love as Jesus did is surely the heart's desire of every true believer.
What was Jesus' source of victory that enabled Him to walk in love? He possessed nothing that we believers today do not possess, but He did know how to develop love in His life so that it produced one hundredfold fruit.
Since God commands His children to imitate Jesus in His love-walk, then we must know how He cultivated and developed this particular fruit in His life. The way in which He did this is found in John 5:17-19:
But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore, the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.Following After The Father
Then answered Jesus and said unto them, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise."
The source of Jesus' victory that enabled Him to walk in love is found in verse 19: "...The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do…." We today must follow this example of Jesus if we expect to walk in love as He walked in love.
Many believers, however, are trying to act like the Son, but are not seeing the Father. Jesus said that the Son could do nothing in Himself, and the same is true of us today—we cannot walk in love without spending time with the Father.
How often believers with good intentions and honest desires become frustrated as they try to walk in love simply because they are trying to act like the Son but are not developing their sight of the Father.
It is only as we imitate the example of Jesus and spend time in the Word and in the Spirit developing our love for the Father that the fruit of love will become manifest in our lives and will enable us to walk in love as Jesus did.
1 John 4:7-8 reiterates that it is only as we know God that we will know how to love one another:
"Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."
Knowing God requires spending time alone with Him. Matthew 14:1-14 is an account of the death of John the Baptist. Within it is a beautiful story of how Jesus spent time with the Father and thereby cultivated and developed the fruit of love in His life.
Excerpt permission granted by Harrison House Publishers