THE PROPHET DAVID said it while prostrated in Your temple, because he had savored your love during the holy tribulation when You fulfilled earthly kingdom affairs that dazzled his eyes and his heart. He said it while feeling Your choosing him was undeserved being merely a shepherd. But he said it with true love so that his words became a psalm we chant. We repeat it having accepted to be members in Your body in favor of an imperishable and undefiled inheritance that never wanes in the heavens, Your greatest Kingdom, incomparable to king David’s.

Our love for You is consequently above body and the world and all its kingdoms, because partnership in Your love is the echo of it, existing with you and in You. There exists no measure for it. The measure of Your love is, as You mentioned, the greatest measure of love, because You saved us through Your death, and raised us through Your resurrection. You conquered the world and gave us Your victory so that our love for You became an echo of Your love, existing in us as it exists in You, at the greatest measure beyond all that is seen and hoped for. The Apostle St. Peter says about Your love that we love You even though we have not seen You. Seeing You is the lowest measure for measuring our love for You. If we are of Your flesh and bones, our love is a real partnership in You, beyond body and flesh, as it cannot be seen nor felt but rather saturates and enflames the feelings. The Psalm words “I will love You O Lord”1is the zenith of the passionate lover. Christ added that it was a joint love: “And he who loves Me …. And I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”2 So that Christ’s love is a partnership through revelation on which the lover lives, is nourished, and forgets the world. It is the metal of the bread descending from heaven on which man is nourished and lives his future. When the Song of Solomon is sung it declares the reality of the joint love: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”3 The gifted prophet here raised the bounds of the love he is living; as the love of an eternal, joint possession wherein the love for Christ completely dominates. This is the feeling of passionate love in which a person loses himself and nothing remains except Christ.

The Apostle Paul explained the feeling in words: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”4 That is not a play on words but is an expression of love that has reached its utmost, where the soul is dissolved and where Christ’s Being, able to fill and possess the soul that has loved Him, is revealed. After which he who loves Christ has nothing to say, as Paul the Apostle’s feeling when he said he saw in Christ that which cannot be uttered, and that is the truth. The essence of Christ’s love is not of our world “I am not of this world.”5 He who possesses the love for Christ is also not of this world.

Christ’s love is one of the mysteries of eternity given in a mystery to the sons of Christ with the consequence of eternity becoming their prepared homeland. Love is the manna with which they are nourished, and which Moses hid in the golden censer6 to be revealed in the age when Christ is revealed. So that I cannot but end this truth except with the Psalm words: “I will love You, O Lord”.7

1 Ps 18.

2 John 14:21.

3 Song 6:3.

4 Gal 2:20.

5 John 8:23.

6 Heb 9:4.

7 Ps 18.

||    The Orthodox Faith (Dogma)    ||    Family and Youth    ||    Sermons    ||    Bible Study    ||    Devotional    ||    Spirituals    ||    Fasts & Feasts    ||    Coptics    ||    Religious Education    ||    Monasticism    ||    Seasons    ||    Missiology    ||    Ethics    ||    Ecumenical Relations    ||    Church Music    ||    Pentecost    ||    Miscellaneous    ||    Saints    ||    Church History    ||    Pope Shenouda    ||    Patrology    ||    Canon Law    ||    Lent    ||    Pastoral Theology    ||    Father Matta    ||    Bibles    ||    Iconography    ||    Liturgics    ||    Orthodox Biblical topics     ||    Orthodox articles    ||    St Chrysostom    ||   

||    Pope Shenouda    ||    Father Matta    ||    Bishop Mattaous    ||    Fr. Tadros Malaty    ||    Bishop Moussa    ||    Bishop Alexander    ||    Habib Gerguis    ||    Bishop Angealos    ||    Metropolitan Bishoy    ||

||    Prayer of the First Hour    ||    Third Hour    ||    Sixth Hour    ||    Ninth Hour    ||    Vespers (Eleventh Hour)    ||    Compline (Twelfth Hour)    ||    The First Watch of the midnight prayers    ||    The Second Watch of the midnight prayers    ||    The Third Watch of the midnight prayers    ||    The Prayer of the Veil    ||    Various Prayers from the Agbia    ||    Synaxarium