“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, than someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:12-13  (ESV)

There is a high price for love.  You can have it for free but it will cost everything.  You cannot love without paying the full price.

God will allow us to choose to live our lives on a lower level than He has called us, but there is a price to pay.  If we do so we will never really and fully know Him nor experience the fullness of the life promised to us in Him.  There is a higher and GREATER love.  Love of this magnitude can only be received, experienced and given away through death. 

There is no greater love than when we die to self, lay ourselves down for someone else.  God wants us to walk in a greater love.  Greater love is received when someone else had to die in order for us to receive it.  Jesus laid down His life to break the barrier that would keep us from receiving the Father’s love.  It was the ultimate expression of love. 

“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet still sinners, Christ died for us.”  Romans 5:8  (NASB)

Jesus broke the barrier of our sin with the laying down of His life.  It doesn’t get any greater than that.

In order for us to have Greater Love, we must die, laying ourselves down for people.  We must die to being right about people or things or we will defend our rights and find an excuse to not love.  We must put away personal justice or we will punish people and seek to justify ourselves in the eyes of others, when Jesus said He was just and the justifier of all.  We must overlook faults or we will keep records of wrong suffered and not love.  Ouch.  Ouch.  If we die to self, we can release GREATER LOVE.  If we don’t, we will love self and then others when convenient.

Are you dying to give GREATER LOVE?