1 John 4:12 English Standard Version (ESV) No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Yesterday’s post ended with these words. “The abiding love is an abounding love.”

There is a difference between abide and abound and that difference should be explained.

Abide means it is present within us. Abounding means abundant, so much so that we cannot contain it within ourselves. Here in the first epistle from John we can see that His love is perfected in us. Think about that for a second. Perfect love in an imperfect person cannot be constrained from being what God intends love to be, shared.

It is not a matter of if we can love, His love in not within our control, He is Lord. We all struggle with loving perfectly because we think His perfect love is within our control. What we fail to recognize is that His abiding love, abounding in us, is too much for us to constrain. We worry and fret about not loving perfectly and allow the lies of the enemy to tell us we have failed.

Since His love is under His control, Satan cannot touch it, constrain it, nor prevent it from spilling out of us like rivers of living waters. Do we see ourselves as a waterfall or a sprinkler? Maybe we feel like a dripping faucet. Would it help if we understand we are not in control of the water pressure?

How we see ourselves is not how God sees us. His love is abounding, filling us all in all. What we feel is not the same things as what we believe. We are to have faith in God and not in ourselves. He is faithful and we need to believe that He will perform His will in us, no matter how we feel.

What I hear in the spirit at this moment is every reader saying “But!”