Free to Love

 

Meditations on

Staying in the Grace for Today 

March 24, 2026

Free to Love

“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”

John 13:34

God created us with a seemingly insatiable need for love, acceptance and a sense of self-worth. These needs seem insatiable because we are in the grips of cultural conditioning that teaches us to meet our needs out of our own abilities and strength, through performance-based acceptance, and through our own accumulation of successes. Despite our best efforts, we can never quite get to the place where we can rest, and thus we continue to strive to meet our needs. Our quest is like trying to quench our thirst by drinking sea water. Eventually we come to the place where we cry out with the Apostle Paul, “Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life . . .” (Romans 7:24). When we do we will come to the same conclusion as Paul, “Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:25).

The answers for meeting our needs for love, acceptance and worth are found in this truth:

Until you know who you are in Christ, you cannot love; you can only take.

Jesus is free to love us unconditionally because he is not dependent on our love. His needs for love, acceptance and worth are fully satisfied by God’s love for him. Until we know that in Christ, we are the beloved child of God, with whom He is delighted and upon whom His favor rests, we will always try to take from the persons and events in our lives anything that we think will satisfy our need for love.

Take time to consider the driving ambition in your profession and avocations. Consider your interpersonal relationships. In what ways are you dependent on them? How often are your words carefully crafted to curry favor with others? The more we are dependent on the praise of others, the more we strive to avoid criticism or rejection by others, the less we are resting in God’s unconditional love for us.

My Takeaway: The converse is just as true. The more we learn to rest in God’s never-ending love and acceptance of us, the less dependent we become on other people to satisfy our needs and the more we become free to love.

Sē’lah

My book on prayer,

First Think, Then Pray

is now available on Amazon Kindle.

 

(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

 

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com.

 

Copyright © 2026 by Alex M. Knight

 

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.