...choose joy...

“Jesus said: ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.  If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command.  I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.  You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.  This is my command: Love each other’” John 15: 9-17.

This may sound counter intuitive, but joy is a choice we make.   To choose joy is to choose to love.   But to love is to love as Jesus commands us to love — to love others as the Father loves Jesus, His Son.   To choose joy is to choose to be obedient to God — to choose to be humble and to live humbly.   To choose joy and to choose to love as Jesus loves is is to realize that the Hound of Heaven has found you and chosen you.   To choose joy is to choose to love and follow and live in complete trust of The Lord.   Such love and joy is immediately revealed before others in the way we love others.   So to choose joy is to choose to love as The Lord loves — so we must love others.   Never try to control or parcel out your love, for that is not at all how the Lord loves.   If you want to knowhow Christ loves, consider and meditate on Good Friday.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Oh Lord, how we have crippled ourselves by not loving others as You love us.   Forgive us, pick us up, and put our feet on the path once again to loving as You love.  Help to taste and smell and touch such joy that comes to us from loving as You love.   Pull us away from self-love, away from selfish love.   May we love totally and completely.  In Your name we pray, Amen.