YAH

With yesterday being Valentines Day, the color red, hearts, love, and romance is at the forefront of our minds. God is the author of love. God is relational between members of the Godhead and God made people in His image. God desires a relationship with us as His special creation, and God made us to be in relationship with each other. Animals show affection and nurturing, but we as humans made in the image of God experience love on a more personal and intimate level. Relationships were designed to be in harmony and love for each other, but because of sin, relationships are broken, hate exists, and the love as God designed it to be between people and husband and wife can be twisted into something that it is not. Sin destroys relaionships. When Adam and Eve sinned for the first time, they experienced death in three ways. They would surely experience physical death. They would experience spiritual death without believing with faith in the word and promises of God. They also experienced a relational death as husband and wife and the close relationship they had with God was broken from what it was. Our God is one of love and restoration, so He made a way that sinful mankind can be reconciled with a holy God. God loves us!

God being the author of love gives us many great passages to demonstrate Gods love for us and how we ought to love one another. I want to share two of those passages with you now. This is one of my favorites:

1 john 3:1-3

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears,[a] we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

God desires a close and personal relationship with his people. God loved us, so we ought to live a life that loves others and seeks to love and serve God. Every time I read verse 1, I am blown away. We as sinful and fallen people who deserve punishment are called the sons of God. God identifies Himself with us because we have put our faith and trust in Jesus and His blood covers us. The second part of verse 1 is a good reminder that when we feel down and discouraged. When Satan wants to lie to us and make us believe that nobody loves you and God does not love you, you can say with confidence, “I am a child of God, and that I am!” We also know that when Jesus comes again, and when we are with Him in Heaven, believers will have a restored close relationsip with God without the stains and burden of sin. We will know God fully as we were designed to be.

A second passage demonstrates the contrast of being dead in sin but alive in God because of His love so well:

Eph 2:1-10

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh[a] and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Wow! There is so much that could be said about this passage. Verses 1-3 is bad news. Our identity previously was not a child of God, but a child of wrath! We were dead and hopeless in our sin. And then hope comes in like a beam of light. “But God who is rich in mercy”. He gives life to dead people. He breathes spiritual life into those who have no hope apart from Jesus. If we are even tempted to think that we deserve any credit for our salvation, twice in verse 5 and verse 8 it says that it is by grace that we are saved. Verse 8 and 9 is one that most of us have memorized and is one we ought to remind ourselves of each day. If you were not feeling loved already by God’s amazing grace, verse 10 brings the message home. Before your birth and before even creation itself, God knew you, loved, you, and made a plan for your salvation and how you will bring God glory with your life. Our good works do not save us, but God set us free from sin so that we are free to live that is good, filled with the love of God and love of others, and that which brings God glory.