For months now, Pastor Bryan Wright at Boomerang Church in the humble, little city of Albemarle, NC has labored to impart the absolute necessity of receiving God’s love first and foremost before ever stepping out in any effort to obey God. This emphasis is because it is only as the God who is love becomes our source that we are at all able to love Him back by keeping His commandments. And all of His injunctions are summed up in John 13:34-35, “ I give you a new commandment: that you should love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you too should love one another. By this shall all [men] know that you are My disciples, if you love one another [if you keep on showing love among yourselves]. The Lord, the Vine, must be our source as obeying God is all by grace, God’s power and ability, and impossible by self-effort. We are lifeless corpses, fleshy souls, apart from Him. John 15:5 puts our state bluntly:  “I am the Vine; you are the branches. Whoever lives in Me and I in him bears much (abundant) fruit. However, apart from Me [cut off from vital union with Me] you can do nothing.“

But oh, what we, the very Body of Christ, can know, for the price of positioning ourselves to receive and letting Him pour His love into us. We are meant to experience the fire within of His unconditional love. We are meant to receive and receive and receive and only after that respond to Him. “We love Him, because He first loved us,” 1 John 4:19 explicitly says. And how we show we love Him is by obedience. John 14:15 is the acid test: ^“If you [really] love Me, you will keep (obey) My commands.” John 15:10 adds the word that to obey Him is to remain in His love: “If you keep My commandments [if you continue to obey My instructions], you will abide in My love and live on in it, just as I have obeyed My Father’s commandments and live on in His love.”