Daily Thought For September 3, 2016

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The Freedom of Living By the Law of Love
 
The new law, which is the Holy Spirit, comes into operation through love. Love, then, is not merely the sum of all the law and the prophets, but very much more: love is their complete fulfillment and the achievement of their whole purpose. Only those who love, truly carry out the law, for only in love can the law be fulfilled. Ezekiel ascribes to the gift of the new heart and the Spirit the capacity to put the law of God into practice (see Ezek 36:27). 
 
Love itself is also a "law," that is, a directive principle, that urges us to battle against the flesh and to do or not to do certain things. Love, however does not urge by constraint of threats or sanctions as the old law had done and as every written law and directive imposed from without still does, but rather by attraction. Filial love, and not servile fear, is the mainspring of all Christian living and doing. 
 
If the precepts of law are put into practice because of fear of punishment rather than because of love of justice, those under the law act in a servile way, and not freely, and that is why the precepts are often not put into practice. . . . On the other hand, when faith is at work through love, it begins to make us take pleasure in the law of God in the very depths of our being. 
 
At the deepest level of the human heart a radical change takes place. If before we tended to look at God with a suspicious and unfriendly eye, as a slave would look on his owner, we now look to him as an ally, a friend, our Father, and on our lips is the spontaneous cry of recognition, "Abba! Father!" (Rom 8: 15). The Christian's entire way of acting is changed; it is truly "deified" because it is now moved by the Holy Spirit: "All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God" (Rom 8:14). God intends the Christian life to be lived that way, in the Holy Spirit, directed by the principle of spontaneity and freedom. It is the life of those who are "in love." 
 
from Come Creator Spirit - Meditations on the Veni Creator by Raniero Cantalamessa pp.260-261

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