THE WINE OF HIS LOVE

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How few believers understand that Heaven is not a place we go to after our physical death. When ever we touch God's Eternal Love we enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Surely, we should be entering into Heaven more fully with each succeeding day as Christ draws us increasingly into His presence. For me prayer has become a wondrous experience where often I am drawn out of the boundaries of time and space and into His Eternal and Glorious Love. Tonight I share with you a message by Sparks along with a favorite saying I formed out of a writing by Teresa of Avila. I pray you are often tasting of the sweet wine of His Love.
Jack

"I have loved thee with an everlasting love." You can never translate that word "everlasting" into English. It simply means that you have got into the spaceless, boundless realm, you have fallen out of time to where time is no more. You have gone out into that mysterious something where nothing can be taken hold of as tangible, it is all beyond you, beyond your grasp, beyond your calculation, beyond your power to cope with it and bring it into some kind of dimensions. That is the word: beyond you, beyond your time, beyond your world, beyond all your ways of thinking and working. "I have loved thee with an everlasting, timeless, spaceless love." Did you notice the alternative marginal reading to the phrase? "Jehovah appeared of old unto me"? It is, "from afar appeared unto me" - outside of our world altogether. He says, "I have loved you with a love altogether outside your dimensions of time and space." T. Austin Sparks

In the inner wine cellar I drank of my Beloved,
and, when I went abroad through all this valley
I no longer knew anything,
And lost the herd which I was following.

I no longer tend the herd
Nor have I any other work
Now that my every act is love.

St. John of the Cross

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