STAGE THREE: PERSEVERING LOVE Ps.27:2,4;Matt. 5:43-48 Invitation to Intimacy [How to Love when You are Unloved]The journey with Christ, like any journey, has unexpected sharp turns, rocky places, and detours on the path.Just when we think we are making progress, we encounter a bend in the road.Stage III is that bend in the road.Things start happening in our life that we had not expected.We may lose our job or a child is diagnosed with a chronic illness or a close friend passes away.Or perhaps it is something far more elusive like a sense of spiritual boredom or apathy.Life with Christ no longer seems predictable.That’s because God loves us too much to allow us to stay in our places of comfortableness and control.He desires to help us gain an eternal perspective… to see things through His eyes.In Stage III, God is inviting us to a deeper knowing of Him and a deeper knowing of ourselves.In Stage II, Obedient Love, we learn the basics of the Christian life, as if putting on an outer garment to cover ourselves.in Stage III, Persevering Love, God invites us to recognize the ways the “garment” of our faith may be covering the motivations of our hearts.We may behave like a follower of Christ, but our motivations and the inner workings of our hearts may still be driven by our personal agendas.We can only come to know, on the deepest levels, that we are loved through moments of raw vulnerability and exposed.Our transformation into Christ-likeness is”a continuing process that unfolds one day at a time as we bring more and more of ourselves to God.I doubt that any of us are old enough to have outlived our enemies, but we should be old enough spiritually to OUT-LOVE our enemies.