THE LOVE FOR CHRIST
Well, in my life, I have come to experience the love for Christ in various aspects. With such an experience, I have found within me something strong and powerful that always urges me to think of and all that pleases God. There is always that great feeling and happiness within me when in the presence of the Spirit of God. Despite temporarily feeling happy and satisfied with doing work or studying whole day at home, such things never get me to the pleasure I get when in the presence of God. However, as Dorothy Day puts it, “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing as compared to love in dreams.” The love for Christ requires sacrifice and commitment.
To maintain the closeness I have with God, I have to strive in maintaining my righteousness. I have to do all that is right according to God’s commandments as stipulated in the Bible. Nonetheless, there are always temptations trying to pull me back from the love for Christ. According to Augsburger (2006), the path of love is full of traps and blind alleys that steer us off track or turn us around. Our fears and our frailty often block our way to serious commitment in love. In the same way, the earthly temptations always try to move me away from the love for Christ.
However, I have always found a way of passing the temptations through prayers. From my experience, maintaining the love for Christ in the contemporary world needs a substantial level of commitment. We must be able to turn away from practices that do not reflect what God expects from us. To do this and respond with love to the world which seems to have gone wrong in fundamental ways, we must get free to love. From this experienced, I have found ways to love better and over the long haul. I have come to understand that we were all created to love God with all our hearts and souls, essentially by loving and serving our neighbors.
In this way, I have learned to become indifferent- determined to do what I believe is right and enhances the love for Christ, even whether such things are not approved by the people around me. I have had a deeper purpose and a greater meaning of life. I have become so passionately and single-mindedly committed, so completely in love that I feel willing to sacrifice anything including my life for the ultimate goal. I feel strong and powerful in the hands of God that no one can stop me from loving Him, for He has power over everything in this world. In the book of Deuteronomy 6: 4- 5, the Bible stipulates that we should not give Yahweh 80 percent of our heart and the remaining 20 percent to some other god. Yahweh deserves all of it.
For this reason, my love for Him is with all my heart and soul. In this, I have developed a fundamental religious attitude …
