Hemmed In and Controlled By Love

 

 For Christ's love compels [controls] us...

he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves

but for him who died for them and was raised again.

2 Cor 5.14,15  

I found it so interesting studying this, that the word 'control' in our language is so often negative when it is talking about something else controlling us (we want to be fully in control of ourselves, our lives). But when we're talking about Christ's love controlling us that is nothing but good a positivething and actually true freedom! 

Kent Hughes: 

Hemmed in by Christ’s love, Paul and those who walk in his revolutionary footsteps “no longer live for themselves.” A thousand things that work to draw us into ourselves are attached parasite-like to our possessions and passions and appetites — all freighted with implosion, all laden with the potential to make us very small and useless. The fact that Christ in love died our death keeps us from living for ourselves, just as it did Paul, so that we are graciously hemmed in by Christ’s love. 

But gloriously, we’re not hemmed in so that we can do nothing at all, but rather so we can do things that are more worthwhile. We are kept from doing evil things so that we might do good things. We are kept from doing things that bring death so that we might do things that bring life. The utter positiveness of this lies in the mounting force of Paul’s words: “and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (v. 15). There is nothing constricted here. This is freedom. What good thing will be denied those who follow the living resurrected Christ (cf. Romans 8:32)? Indeed, it is the path to new freedoms and unfolding joys.