Amazing Love!
An Uplifting Message on God’s Love for Us.
Life Church 9th September 2012.
I John 4: 7-10.
The last part of 1 Jn. 4:8 – “…God is love.”
Love is not just one of the central attributes of God’s character - God IS love.
God = love
If you want to know what love is all about, look at God. God’s love is different from any other love you will ever experience.
I want to share with you five amazing facts about God’s love for YOU!
1. God Created You for the Purpose of Loving You
One of the most important things you need to comprehend is that you are not here by blind chance and evolutionary processes.
God is a Creator God
Gen. 1:1 0 “In the beginning, God created…”
You are not an accident of nature. You are created by Almighty God.
King David recognized this fact in Ps. 139:13-16 – “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
When God went to the drawing board and designed you He did it with the express intent of loving you and having a relationship with you.
The basic function of your life is to recognise that you are the object of God’s love.
Eph. 1:4-5 (NLT) – “Long ago, even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into His family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave Him great pleasure.”
Our purpose in life is found in being loved by God.
ü God has always intended to love you!
ü Before this world was ever created, God already laid His eyes on you as an item of His desire – as an object of His divine and perfect love.
If you’re living for any other reason than to enjoy a love relationship with God, you are missing out on your real purpose in life!
Fact One – God created you for the purpose of loving you.
2. God Takes the Initiative in Loving You.
God did not wait for you to come to Him. He has pursued a relationship with you. God woos or courts us into a relationship with Him. God has initiated the relationship process.
The fact of the matter is that none of us, in and of ourselves, would ever seek God on our own initiative:
Rom. 3:10-12: “As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
Quote: C.S. Lewis said that, “when people talk about their search for God, it’s like the mouse speaking of his search for the cat.”
We all have the desire to be loved. God created us with the desire to be loved. However, human love never adequately fills that desire. Because we know that we’re not fully satisfied, we look to fill the empty place inside us with all sorts of things:
ü Pleasure – sex, drugs, alcohol, entertainment
ü Success – to be the winner in everything we do
ü Popularity – to be well-like, admired, and accepted by everyone
ü Possessions – to have a lot of stuff or to have only the most expensive stuff
Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, describes someone who tries to fill the empty space as someone who “toils for the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 5:16).
No matter what we use to fill the void in our life, if it’s not a love relationship with God, they will never do the job.
When we reject relationship with God and look for other things to fill that void, we will face some, and maybe even all, of the following:
Ø Loneliness
Ø Guilt
Ø Fear
Ø Anger (with our self, with others, and even with God)
Ø Inadequacy
Ø Emptiness
Quote: Augustine: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they learn to rest in You.”
All the while we’re looking for love in the wrong places, God is actively pursuing a relationship with us.
Jeremiah 31:3: “The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: I have loved with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness.”
We’re looking in every direction but toward God but God is gently and lovingly wooing us and courting our attention. He also comes to you today, right here in this place, relentlessly seeking you out.
Fact one: God created you to have a love relationship with you.
Fact two is that God takes the initiative to establish that love relationship.
3. God’s Love is Unconditional
God’s love is not tied to the worth of the person being loved. He loves you no matter what.
The New Testament uses a very special word that gets translated as love but every time it’s a reference to the love that God has for each one of us.
The special word for God’s love is “agape.”
New Testament originally written in common Greek. First century common Greek utilized four different words that simply got translated into English as the generic word love:
Ø Philos – friendship love.
Ø Eros – romantic love or passion.
Ø Storge – family love
Ø Agape – love for its own sake.
What’s the difference between the first three words and agape? The first three are based on what the other party does for you and benefits both equally.
Agape – sacrificial and committed and exists for the sole benefit of the one being loved. That’s the kind of love God has for you!
Agape leaves us “agape” – astonished!
The difficulty is that we treat God’s love like “Eros” love – we convince ourselves that if we don’t “feel” it He cannot love us. I do not feel the air in my lungs, but I still breathe!
Quote: John Ortberg, “Love Beyond Reason”, states
it this way: “God doesn’t just love you because he has to, he loves you because he wants to. God delights in you. Of course, that doesn’t mean God delights in everything you do. Your own mother doesn’t do that, if she’s at all healthy. But the fact that you exist-you, your own self- is very good in God’s eyes. God likes to love you.”
God IS love but He perfectly tempers His love with justice and holiness:
Ø Because of His holiness, God cannot allow sin in His presence.
Ø Because we’re all sinners, we’re separated from God.
Ø Because we’re sinners, we cannot come into relationship with God.
If you remember how much God hates sin, you understand just how much Christ loved us to leave heaven for an environment filled with unrighteousness and contaminated with sin.
Because of His justice, God requires that the penalty for sin must be paid.
Rom. 6:23 – “For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We owed a debt we could not pay but because He loves us, God paid a debt that He did not owe.
Rom. 5:8 – “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Christ loved you enough to die an excruciatingly painful death just so you could have a love relationship with Him.
1 Jn. 3:16 – “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”
He died knowing everything about you: everything you’d ever do, every thought you ever had, every blemish and sin was known to Him when He gave His life for you.
Philip Yancey, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”, puts forth two stunning concepts:
Ø There is nothing we can do to make God love us more
Ø There is nothing we can do to make God love us less
Now He loves us so much that He will love us the way we are, but He also loves us too much to leave us the same way.
Before we accept His love we are called “sinners” – “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom.
But there is a New Testament shorthand for this: “saints”.
You don’t have to die and then have two attested miracles attributed to you before you are called a saint in the New Testament sense.
You just have to accept Christ!
(cf. Rom.
First Fact: God created you for the purpose of loving you. Second fact: God initiates this love relationship. Third Fact: God’s love is unconditional and…
4. God’s Love is Stubborn
Psalm 89:1-2a – “I will sing of the LORD’s great love forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations. I will declare that your love stands firm forever…”
We’ve already discussed the New Testament’s special word for God’s love. The Old Testament also has a special word for God’s love, the Hebrew word, “chesed”.
It has the sense of love, kindness and mercy all wrapped together, but it is also a word that designates stubbornness and loyalty in its affection.
God’s love stays faithful to us long after we’ve forfeited any claim to His love. God’s love is a binding kind of love, a love that refuses to give up.
That means God has not given up on you yet!
God’s “stubborn love” is described by the apostle Paul:
Romans 8:35-38 – “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
First Fact: God created you for the purpose of loving you.
Second fact: God initiates this love relationship. Third Fact: God’s love is unconditional and
Fourth fact: God’s love is stubborn, and finally:
5. God Wants You To Love Him In Return
Just as God gives of Himself to loves us, He also wants us to return that love to Him.
The God who created all things and who needs nothing actually rejoices when we love Him in return. God’s greatest delight is when we respond to the love He has shown us and love Him in return.
Several important things we need to remember:
Ø We don’t deserve His love.
Ø He doesn’t need our love.
Ø But He wants our love.
Ø God simply gives us the choice to love Him or not to love Him.
Ø It’s totally for our benefit and not for His to do so.
God’s message to us is etched on a Roman cross. The letters are blood red. They scream to be heard. God’s message says, “I love you.”
Quote: Max Lucado, “A Gentle Thunder”: “If God had
a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it. He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning. When you want to talk, He’ll listen. He could live anywhere in the universe, and He chose your heart. And that Christmas gift He sent you in Bethlehem ; not to mention that Friday at Calvary ? Face it, friend. He’s crazy about you!”
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