Your Love is a Firm Foundation

“I will build my life upon your love, it is a firm foundation.” Build My Life, Housefires

I’ve been thinking about this line since I led this song on Sunday.  I’ve been asking the question, “what does it look like for His love to become our our firm foundation?”

The Holy Spirit kept bringing up John 15.

Here Jesus introduces Himself as the Vine, the Father as the vinedresser, and the disciples as the branches. He talks about being pruned and being fruitful, and how we are to abide in Him, in His word, and in His love. He spoke of this so that His joy may be in them and that their joy may be full. 

And then he gives them this new command, “that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:12-13 ESV

Jesus then tells them he’s no longer calling them servants but his friends because servants doesn’t know what their master is doing. All that the Father has made known to Jesus, he has made known to them so that they can bear much fruit and that whatever they ask in the Father’s name, he may give it to them. And this is so that they will love one another. 

Abiding in Jesus leads us to the kind of love he displayed. And the kind of love he exemplified is when he laid his life down for us on the cross. That’s the firm foundation that is unmovable, unwavering, and unshakeable. That’s the kind of love we can trust and that kind of love he is shaping our hearts into.

Which reminded me about the way our brain and body processes information.

The Science of Transformation

Neuroscientists has shown that our unconscious (things we aren’t aware of) picks up roughly 40-50 million bits of information while our conscious (thing we are aware of) pick up only about 50. 

The gap is huge. So there’s a 99.999 percent chance that choices we make or even how we react are based on underlying conditioning we’ve had based on the layers of experiences, culture, environments, wounds, pain, trauma that have become belief systems that informs the way we live.

Our body is this organic mechanism that shapes and adapts to millions of invisible streams of data from the moment we are born.

Transformed through Abiding

If Jesus way of life is to lay my life down for my neighbor and to walk in perfect love, there will be a dissonance between the reality I am living in now and the glory I am called to live in, if I am not aware of how I have been shaped by things that are outside of me. I can react because of a trigger. I might not be in any real danger, but my body believes I am. So it is so much harder to walk by the Spirit because it’s at war with my mind and body. 

Here’s the thing that I realized, we don’t have to be aware of the 50 millions bits of information that comes at us, but we can train our senses to discern whether our choices and values align with the way Jesus lived his life. 

So Jesus invites us to abide. Abiding, then leads to pruning. With the help of the Holy Spirit, he begins to shapes our hearts to learn to love. Pruning leads to fruitfulness (fruit of the spirit), and fruitfulness leads to joy.

Putting on the New Self

There layers and layers of things that are conditioning us and millions of information that are shaping us in a daily bases and it can be too much if we are trying to become aware of it, but Paul empowering us how to walk in a new way of being, simply tells us to put off the old self and put on the new. 

If we are being conformed to the image of Jesus, then, we know what the new self looks like. We can distinguish whether we are walking in the new way of being that is in Christ or not. It can be overwhelming thinking of all the information coming at us but if His love has become our firm foundation, then our choices and behavior has an anchor and a center. 

When Paul says, “In Him we move, we live and have our being,” we are invited in a journey of realigning, reconditioning, recalibrating of our minds, bodies, hearts and spirits to the new creation we are in Christ. It’s not a one time event but a process.

As we have been studying about being a Community of Transformation, I want to leave you with this prayer from Paul to the Ephesians. I invite you to hold in your heart, meditate on it, and find yourself becoming more transformed into His likeness.

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Ephesians 3:14-21