God's Love for Me

Valentine’s Day showcases what our world thinks about love. Flowers, chocolates, hearts, dinner dates.  These are all feelings. Nice, fuzzy feelings; there’s nothing wrong with them. But they aren’t sustainable. You can’t sustain a marriage on fuzzy feelings. You can’t build a parent/child relationship on fuzzy feelings. And Jesus didn’t save the world on fuzzy feelings.

It wasn’t enough for Him to watch from heaven and tell us that He loved us. We would have heard words we could not believe as we lived and died and went to hell. Words and feelings are not believable as love. Words fall on deaf ears until we see love in action.

1 John 3:16 states, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”  “Perceive” means “to know; to understand; to observe.” The only reason we know God loves us is that He acted on it. He sent His Son to die for me. He laid down His life for mine.  1 John 4: 9-10 says, “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  God sent and Jesus came.

Jesus’ coming to earth shows us His love.  It is only as I understand God’s love for me that I can begin to love others properly. Stop and think about what redemption meant to Jesus. No, really. Stop and think about it. That is love.  I’ve been studying God’s love for me over the past few months and it’s amazing.

The Bible says

Nothing can separate me from God’s love.  Rom. 8:38-39

God takes pleasure in me. Ps. 149:4, 147:11

God holds my hand. Is. 41:13

God delights in me. Ps. 18:19

God loves me with an everlasting love even when I sin. Jer. 31:3

God had a great love for me even when I was a sinner. Eph. 2:4

God’s love is beyond my knowledge. Eph. 3:17-19

That last passage in Ephesians states that I must know God’s love to be “filled with all the fullness of God.”  That’s what I want. I want God to fill me. I want God to be what splashes out on others as they interact (and bump into!) me.