If you trust in Jesus Christ, His perfect life, His death on The Cross and resurrection from the grave God showers a special grace upon you. God’s love for you is the greatest love one could ever know — it is glorious, sacrificial, a mighty fortress, unchanging, and permanent.
“No, the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” (John 16:27)
“The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
And as God loves us, we are to conform to His Son’s image and love one another not as the world loves, but with the forgiveness, grace, mercy, steadfastness, gentleness and lowliness that marks those who belong to God. This is evidence of our faith, a transformed life that is growing in holiness day by day, season after season until our last breath on this earth.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)
To be covered with Christ’s righteousness, saved from God’s wrath on the Day of Judgement, and enjoy God’s special grace over our lives are things we ought to be remember and be grateful for daily. And yet, we have to go beyond what benefits us with our salvation as well. We tend to think of The Cross in terms of what it accomplished for us. We see ourselves as the focus of Jesus’ death; that He died to rescue us from judgement and hell, for our eternal glory when we reach Heaven. All of those things are certainly true. God chose us before the foundation of the world to have our names written in the Book of Life and once adopted into His family, lavishes His love upon us all the days of our lives. Be that as it may, if we want to live and think in a way that honors the Lord and is faithful to the full context of The Bible, we must view The Cross not with our eyes, but from Heaven’s perspective.
Dr. John Piper has said, “God’s glory is the perfect harmony of all his attributes into one infinitely beautiful and personal being” and I agree. That infinitely beautiful and personal being is Jesus Christ. As image bearers of God and as redeemed possessions of God whom The Son calls “His Own”, we have been created to display a flawed fraction of a shadow of God’s glory to a broken and sinful world but even a flawed fraction of a shadow is still worth displaying if it would point to the majestic glory of our Creator God. You see, God is solely Holy. As such, Every person within the Trinity has always existed, The Godhead did not come into being and The Godhead was not created — The Godhead simply and marvelously was and is and is to come, The Great I Am. Father Son and Holy Spirit has always been, is and will be in perfect relationship with one another, serving in perfect function with one another, and fully self-sustaining. Nothing about God is contingient upon us. God is sovereign. God’s love exists because it is the essence of His Holy nature to perfectly and infinitely embody all that is good, perfect, and worthy of praise. Justice, Mercy, Wisdom, Love are just some of what He embodies and because God perfectly and infinitely embodies Love, humans coming into existence was from the overflow of His Love and Beauty and Wonderment, not because God was lonely or needed us. We were created because God’s beauty, love, and creativity flowed out of Him simply by being God. And because of The Father’s perfect and infinite love for The Son, He planned the greatest Love story of all time. He created a people needed a Lord and Saviour, who would be set apart for Him to be rescued. Because of The Son’s perfect love for The Father, He willingly condescended Himself into a baby to grow up to be a man who suffered Man’s hate and The Father’s full cup of wrath and died on a tree fashioned into a cross. Father and Son’s perfect love for Holy Spirit positioned Him to indwell those He would call His own to comfort, guide, correct, empower, unite and inspire God’s adopted children, Jesus’ bride by illuminating His Word to them. Holy Spirit’s perfect love for Father and Son submitted to His role within The Godhead. (More on this topic in a future blog post — there is a lot to expound on and Scripture to explain that will take much more than a devotional to cover)
I love this article from Crossway which says,
“Or consider the way the apostle Peter says it. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Why did God send Jesus Christ to die for us? “That he might bring us to God”—to himself. God sent Christ to die so that we could come home to the all-satisfying Father. This is love. God’s love for us is God’s doing what he must do, at great cost to himself, so that we might have the pleasure of seeing and savoring him forever. If it is true, as the psalmist says to God, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11), then what must love do? It must rescue us from our addiction to self and bring us, changed, into the presence of God.”
Questions to ask yourself:
- How does this change, expand, or reinforce your view of God?
- Have you ever thought about The Trinity being in perfect and infinite relationship with each other and the result of that is the creation and redemption of you and I?
Prayer Prompt:
Acknowledge God’s absolute Holiness and thank Him that He has set His perfect love upon you because of His embodiment of LOVE.