"There is a fire of Divine Love.
It is this love which burns the believer and can even cause the believer to suffer. How? Sometimes the absence of the Beloved greatly affects the believer.
Sometimes the believer hears the inward voice of the Beloved calling. It is a gentle whisper and proceeds from out of the believer's inmost depths...where the Lord, the Lover, abides. It is this whisper which possesses the believer almost to the point of undoing. The believer realizes how near is his Lord and yet he also realizes how much of the soul has not yet been possessed by Him.
This intoxicates the believer and puts an insatiable longing within him to be changed into the likeness of his Lord. Therefore it can be said of love: Divine love is as strong as death, for it kills just as surely as death kills."
-Michael Molinos
When we begin to dive deeper in our relationship with the Lord, we very quickly come to realize that His love is unlike any love we've yet experienced. I like how Molinos said "there is a fire of Divine Love", because that is such a fantastic picture. Fire warms. Fire gives comfort, strength and peace. Fire also burns, consumes and destroys. God's love is the same way. We can find a constant and ever-present refuge in God's love for us; we can hide away in Him, and find shelter in Him. He is our confidence, our strength, our peace. And yet at the same time, behind the scenes--or, sometimes, not so behind the scenes--God's love is doing something else...it is consuming you! God's love sets ablaze and burns away every part of your soul that stands against Him.
So often in the Bible, the illustration of purifying gold is used for what God does in our lives. Only in extremely high and excruciating heat will the impurities in gold finally come to the surface to be skimmed off, eventually leaving the remaining metal completely pure. God will stop at nothing until He fills every part of you with His love; that love which, like a fire, both comforts and consumes, strengthens and burns. We have a God that is so vast, so powerful, so incredible, that in His presence all that is not Him cannot help but be consumed by Him.
"Therefore it can be said of love: Divine love is as strong as death, for it kills just as surely as death kills." In God's presence, we die, and He becomes everything.
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