God's Love
The Word of God says that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Why is it, then, that so many people only have an overwhelming sense of God’s anger towards us—and very rarely in the context of His love? Love is such a valuable concept when it comes to God. Scripture tells us that He is love. Yet it seems these days that we tend to avoid preaching on God’s love for fear that people will get the “wrong idea” about who He is.
By only emphasizing God’s wrath, people are not learning to know and fear God, they are only learning to know and fear consequences. We tend to speak with the attitude that “God forbid a sinner would think that God loves them.” We will busy ourselves with pointing out the sins of the sinners and the mistakes of the saints and forget to remind people that God is requiring change out of love for us. Many sinners reject God, and many saints are discouraged, both behind the belief that they are hopelessly serving a God of neverending anger who hates them. Yet "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” “God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.“
We can’t continue to throw the Word out of the window in hopes of only scaring people into believing in Christ and/or serving God wholeheartedly. People need an opportunity to understand that God loves them and that, as the Word says, His kindness, forbearance, and patience is meant to lead us to repentance. Many of us can’t love others because we treat people the same way that we feel God treats us—only with eternal wrath and tolerance, not loving kindness. But "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He gave us Christ while we were still filthy in sin. God Himself gave us Christ Jesus while we were still sinners, out of love, but we are withholding the true message of Christ from the sinner. We received Christ’s love when we were in sin, but it seems that we have the audacity to now turn around and alter the message of His love to the sinner.
There are people reading our blogs, our TLs, our lives each day who despise their sin and current lifestyles but don’t understand that they can come to Christ. We must do better to help others (and ourselves) understand that God loves us so much that He gave Jesus Christ to die so that we can live. Christ died so that if we would believe in Him, we don’t have to be destroyed by sin.
If/when you have more time, I have a related post on walking in freedom from sin here. Be blessed.
