God's Love - Part 1

Why do we worship God?  There is the simple answer: the Bible tells us we should.  The complex answer is: we worship God for who He is and what He has done.  One of the best things He is is LOVE and one of the best things He has done is LOVE US.  God describes Himself as “the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands [of generations] and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin...” Ex 34:6.   Because of His love He created us, redeemed us, and gave us the Holy-Spirit (power to live according to His covenant of love).    So what about God's love...How do we know God loves us?  How much does God love us?  What can separate us from God's love?  When did God start loving us?   What about when we sin, does God still love us?  What does God do with our confessed sin?  How important is it that we love him?  We will endeavor to answer these questions from the scripture itself this month and next.

How do we know God loves us?

He sent His Son to die for us, in our place so that we could know and love Him.  He knew before He created the world it would cost His Son, yet He created it anyway.

John 3:16  "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

1John 3:16  This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

1John 4:9-10  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins

1John 4:19  We love because he first loved us.

How much does God love us?

As much as He loves Jesus!  He sacrificed Jesus for us (Rom 8:31-32)!  John 17:23  I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me..

Eph 3:16-21  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

The word rooted in verse 17 means “become stable,  to render firm, to fix, establish, cause a person or a thing to be thoroughly grounded.”  God wants His love to be our stable, fixed and firm cause of grounding in who we are and why we are important.  The word grounded in the same verse means “to lay a basis for, that is, (literally) erect, or (figuratively) consolidate, to lay the foundation, to found, to make stable, establish.”  God wants His love to be our foundation upon which we lay the basis for who we are as a person, to erect a stable view of our intrinsic value based on His love for us.

Paul uses four words here to quantify a three dimensional object.  He describes the width, length and height of  God's  love but then adds the word deep.  Why?  The word deep is defined as “ profundity, that is, (by implication) extent; (figuratively) mystery” or the “deep things of God.”  Paul is describing a three-dimensional love, an experiential love, a love far beyond knowledge,  infinite love.  Love that God wants us to build our foundation upon, keep on growing in, and resting upon.

References

All Scriptures not specified are quoted from Life in the Spirit Study Bible (NIV). Stamps, Donald C., and John Wesley Adams. Life in the Spirit Study Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003. Print.