Last Wednesday we looked at part 1, The Love of God, the Love for God:
We focused in on some way of "How" God shows us His love:
(these are in no way the only ways that God shows His love, but these are the areas He has pressed on my heart for the students I get the awesome privilege to be around every Wednesday night)
(these are in no way the only ways that God shows His love, but these are the areas He has pressed on my heart for the students I get the awesome privilege to be around every Wednesday night)
How He Loves:
1. He loves us first- John tells us in 1 John 4:8-10, that God Himself is love, and without Him there can be no love. So we could even really dive off the theological diving board and say that Love was the first thing created. Wait, God always was so..... We could stay in that discussion for a while, though it would be uplifting and true, it would be time-consuming.
2. He loves us Fully - Romans 5:8 tells us that even while we were still sinning, neck-deep dying in sin, He loved us. It totally backs us that He loved us first, but it even makes it better knowing that before I could even imagine about loving anything He loved me. This verse blows my mind every time I read it!
3. He loves us Forever - John 3:16 Probably the most well-known verse of scripture, not only re-emphasizes how much He loves us, but how long he will love us. He wants us to spend eternity with Him. And verse 17 shows us that He desires that all come to know Him, that the WORLD would be saved.
In approaching a simple view of God's love, it is easy to see how His love has the power to overwhelm us no matter how it can be described.
On our end of things........
When we think of love we, more times than not, think of ourselves.
1. We love ourselves - Philippians 2:3-4 & Ephesians 5:29 both remind us of how selfish we are. We don't have to be told to love ourselves, we obviously have to be encouraged not to fall into that self-love. All the way from the fall of man, till now we have no problem of love us. If we are truly going to "love" then we have to have God in our lives. There can be no "L.O.V.E." it is "L.U.V as my preacher used to say. It's just not of God.
2. We love our stuff - This fits into loving ourselves, but we can make a whole separate category for our stuff. Just like ,"The Rich, Young Ruler" in Mark 10:17-22 we don't want to give up our "stuff" for the sake of Christ. We may be a Christian but we have become accustomed to things and we get comfortable, so we try to justify not giving them up. The bad part of this, if we are not careful we will actually try to flip the tables and blame God for us not wanting to give up our stuff to follow Him. How messed up is that? But we attempt to justify our situation with the answer, "I haven't had the Holy Spirit lead me that way." God has given us the Holy Spirit to be our helper, to help us understand what HIS WORD says. If we are solely leaning on our interpretation of the Holy Spirit we are still relying on man's heart to decide. There comes a time in a Christian's life where we totally surrender everything we have to God, because He is our all.
3. We love our Savior? - Do we love God with everything that we have, as Jesus told us what the most important commandment in Mark 12:29-31. Do we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind & strength? Does His love overflow out of our lives to the point that we ooze Jesus out of our pores?
If our answer is a resounding "Yes!" to we do love our Savior then we have gotten totally over ourselves and all of our stuff. So many times the things that hold us back from unconditionally loving the Father are such trivial things.
We mush camp out in Romans 8:37-38 There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. NOTHING.
Do we love like that?
