Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
You are praying for someone, a loved one; your heart is drawn to that person. You find yourself willing to be "accursed from Christ" for the sake of that person (cf. Rom. 9:3). That's the genuine article that the Bible says is agape.
Moses had that kind of love, for he begged the Lord to remove his name from the Book of Life if He could not save rebellious Israel (Ex. 32:31-33).
The very intensity of your agape praying for your loved one is evidence that the Lord hears your prayers; He will not deceive you! And now you have something in common with the Lord Jesus, for He loves that person more than you have ever loved him or her. Now you two are working together!
Very likely your beloved has somewhere become alienated from "the commonwealth of Israel" (Eph. 2:12) because he or she has been inoculated with the virus of the Old Covenant, possibly in a "Christian" school or church. The Old Covenant "gendereth to bondage" (Gal. 4:24,King James Version). There are probably millions around the world in various stages of spiritual bondage because of the machinations of Old Covenant thinking.
Do not give in to despair; you may be part of the problem and not realize it, but now that you realize it you have something in common with the Lord Jesus--you are on the way to recovery. If the agape of Christ leads you to experience the love that the apostle Paul or Moses had for Israel, that means that you have begun to sense that the great controversy between Christ and Satan is an issue of greater importance than your own personal salvation. You are "growing up into Christ" (Eph. 4:15).
Now your supreme concern is not for your own salvation, but the salvation of someone else, and the honor, the vindication, the reward that the Lord Jesus deserves for His great sacrifice of dying the world's second death (Rev. 20:14). This is a "big idea"!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: June 14, 2007.
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