Love Beyond Abstract
By John Gavazzoni

There is love as an abstract concept, and there is Love as Being. It is one thing to extoll love in the abstract; it is another thing to BE Love and to freely live out that Being in action at any cost. God IS Love. To experience the highest form of love requires a personal encounter, a meeting of and with God Himself. The Greek word reserved by the Holy Spirit to convey Love at that transcendent level in the New Testament is the word agape and its verb form, agapao.

THAT Love cannot be taught abstractly. It is met, it is encountered, It touches and embraces you at the deepest level that your being requires. That Love is your Source and Destiny. You came out of Its bowels and Its womb. Any inspired consideration, for instance, of what has been called the law of circularity, will lead to Agape conceived, born, and matured into embodiment as the One True Human, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, God's uniquely begotten Son, within Whom we have been granted that union which biblical salvation is all about.

I have observed the following syndrome: Someone is confronted by Love's embodiment by "the old, old story, of Jesus and His love." There results a primal, pristine moment of divine encounter, BUT that encounter shortly enters a contrarian period of time (different for each individual) when the Love within that encounter yields to the soul being enticed to seek an understanding that comes not from a communion with God as love, but an understanding that is about intellectual/conceptual satisfaction.

It's a mind trip that is the counterfeit of experientially and intimately KNOWING Love in the communion of Love. We place God in a brightly colored box of OUR understanding, wrap a ribbon around it, tie a bow on top, and go forth to presume we're "preaching the gospel." There is only one understanding of eternal worth, and that is God's own understanding of Himself that He shares with us. Otherwise, we become gods, knowing good and evil, without knowing God. We become as God in that sense, without knowing Him. Only a very little vestige of that primal, pristine encounter remains, until we become weary trying to make God fit in our box.

The encounter always results in some degree of infusion, so that you begin to existentially Be what you have encountered, for that encounter sets you free to Be who you truly and timelessly are as a child of Love. You have met the Being in Whom you have your being, and God's freedom sets you free to be what you are. God's Son, Jesus, is called in scripture, "the Son of His (Father God) Love," or it may be translated as "the Son who is His Love."

True gospel preaching and teaching must be a matter of infusion, not mere theological packaging. One of the most important things the Lord has taught me is that apostolic-quality preaching, teaching, and sharing, is "not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in the demonstration of spirit and power."

That is, Christ Himself, and the very dynamic of the Christ Event, is transferred from the witness to the hearer, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and Christ, crucified, risen, and glorified, resident in, and as, the Word, is encountered and experienced. God did not send a heavenly messenger to present a Bible study ABOUT His Love. God sent His Son, who is the perfect Son-image of Himself as Love. "THUS God loved the world that He gave us His only/uniquely begotten Son..."

It pleased the Father that all fullness (essentially the fullness of love) should dwell in Christ. In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is why Watchman Nee said (not an exact quotation), "God is not a retailer dispensing packets of grace. He has only one thing to give us, His Son."

I have observed how brethren reach a point of being so weary of boxing Jesus up into a neat package of intellectual satisfaction--- though while having come genuinely to realize that "love is the thing, really the only thing"--- that trying to figure out Jesus as He's presented in scripture becomes a burden too great to carry. Imagine that. We have turned Him into a burden, the One who said, "Come unto me all ye who labor and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden light."