Dont read this if you dont want to hear truth about loving your - TopicsExpress

Dont read this if you dont want to hear truth about loving your enemy...very convicting and truth bearing. The scripture is at the end. Dont miss that either... An Undeserved Gift Who is on your gift list this Christmas? Usually, we give gifts to family and friends. We want to buy gifts for people we love and people we care about. We tend to give gifts to those who treat us well, people who are kind and considerate to us. And often we will give gifts in return for gifts that we have received. Some of us will even buy gifts for our pets. However, we generally don’t buy gifts for our enemies, do we? We don’t give a gift to the person who has slandered us in the past year. We don’t give a gift to the irate neighbor who never has a kind word to say. We don’t give a gift to someone who has tried to run us out of business. Nor do we send a gift to the thief who stole the car stereo last month. But think about this: when God sent Jesus Christ, His Son, and gave us this ultimate gift, He gave it to us while we were still His enemies. The Bible tells us, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). We did nothing whatsoever to merit or deserve this gift. In fact, what we really deserve is judgment, because we all have sinned against God. We all have deliberately crossed that line. The amazing truth of Christmas is that, in spite of our sins, God sent His Son to save us. In that tiny manger in Bethlehem, He gave us an undeserved gift. Summary sentence: Have you received an “undeserved” gift before? Copyright © 2011 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved. Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ROM 5:6-8 MSG Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.