Devotional by Diana Golden

The following prayer was recently posted on the King James Bible daily devotional website:

“Father, help me to be perfected in Your love. Help me show Your face to the world through my actions. Help me to love others in such a way that I disappear and all they see is You. Let Your love drive out all selfishness in me, that I may truly be love to someone else. Amen.”

I found this prayer truly inspirational and began wondering how one can go about loving so strongly that one disappears and the only thing that others see is God working through us. What does it mean for God’s love to be perfected in us?

1 John 4: 7-12 states “Dear friends, we should love each other, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has become God’s child and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love to us: He sent his one and only Son into the world so that we could have life through him. This is what real love is: It is not our love for God; it is God’s love for us in sending his Son to be the way to take away our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us that much we also should love each other. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God loves in us, and his love is made perfect in us.”

One sided love is not perfect love – love must be mutual to be perfected, as stated in 1 John 3:24, “The people who obey God’s commands live in God, and God lives in them. We know that God lives in us because of the Spirit God gave us.” And, again in 1 John 4:16, “And so we know the love that God has for us, and we trust that love. God is love. Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.”

May you find the prayer at the opening of the devotional as inspirational as I did. As in 2 Peter 1:19, we should “follow closely what the prophets have said as you would follow a light shining in a dark place, until the day begins and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Diana Golden