YOU are LOVED! When it comes to describing God’s unfathomable love, even the Bible admits defeat. God’s love for you extends far beyond the bounds of human comprehension. Yet through a spiritual miracle you can gain personal insight into the incomprehensible. I can easily believe that the atom-holding, earth-spinning, galaxy-sustaining, life-giving Source of everything wonderful can do whatever he likes. Even the devil believes God’s power. My difficulty is believing that God’s special love for me makes him long to use that power on my behalf. Few of us doubt that God can do amazing things. The weak link in our faith is believing that he would do such things for ordinary, inconsequential you and me. We suspect we are not sufficiently special in the Almighty’s eyes to warrant such attention. Oh yes, ‘God loves everyone,’ but we have a hunch that by the time that love reaches us it has spread pretty thin. I’m just one of millions. Why would God want to focus his omnipotence on me? If we could grasp the enormity of God’s love for us, our faith would sky-rocket. Pray for a revelation. (Ephesians 3:17-19 highlights the necessity of such prayer. ‘I pray that you . . . may have power . . . to . . . know this love that surpasses knowledge . . .’) ** God Love ** Awareness of how much we are loved is forever slipping from our consciousness. Partially in sight for a few days, it begins to fade again. The following suggestions might help. When we let God down – even if we really foul things up – picture the proudest father the world has seen. The baby screams, dribbles and soils itself, yet Dad still glows with pride. God is like that. A woman e-mailed me complaining that the above paragraph does not apply to people like her. She was guilty not of some embarrassing slip, like I had in mind, but of a prolonged moral fall. But Helen had chosen the wrong person to complain to. I knew the full story so completely that she is my trusted ministry partner. Helen had struggled to truly repent, being reluctant to let go of that enticing sin. But I know the depth of repentance that Helen finally found. I know the love and humility and brutal honesty that drives her to confess to more and more people just how depraved she had been. She does not glory in her past like some mistakenly seem to, but she ruthlessly exposes her failure in order to inspire others to grasp the same cleansing and forgiveness she has found. And is God proud of this Christian who fell so hard? Absolutely. Proud of her fall? No. Proud of how she grasped God’s hand of forgiveness. When you feel like a tiny blob in the seething mass of humanity, see the shepherd of a hundred sheep frantically searching for one. If he can be personally concerned for one, the omnipotent Shepherd of our souls can love all humanity and still be devoted to you. In the beautiful words of Isaiah, ‘As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you’ (Isaiah 62:5). When you feel you can do nothing right, picture a child, paintbrush in hand, gleaming with excitement. Enveloping her hand is the gentle hand of the world’s greatest artist. ‘And what shall we put in this corner?’ asks the man, as his skill and the girl’s imagination merge into one. See the artist’s smile and the child’s delight as together they create stunning beauty. Under God’s guiding hand, your possibilities are mind-boggling. No matter how you feel, you are the focus of God’s attention; doted on as though you are the only friend God has. If ever a man wanted to shower his bride with love, or his son with gifts, God longs to lavish you with his extravagance. Expect great things from God. Anything less is an insult to your almighty Savior. With your Lord impossibilities are playthings. Let faith mushroom by seizing the fact that the Omnipotent Lord is powerful enough to use you – over-riding your every inadequacy - and loving enough to want to. Everything God touches is destined for glory. Even now, you are God’s ‘filthy rags to heavenly riches’ success story. ** God Love ** Do I need a flock of angels on my roof, or an all expense paid trip to heaven and back before I will accept that God thinks I am important to him? Christ’s shed blood proves God’s pledge of total commitment to me. Am I to pronounce that sacrifice inadequate and demand additional proof? Must God send a bolt of spiritual electricity through me before I’ll believe he wants to bless me? In his grace God might send me some special confirmation of his love, as he has done for thousands, but to so focus on this possibility as to not believe unless he does it, is the height of impertinence. If every non-Christian on this planet had amazing (though phony) spiritual encounters and every Christian received divine visitations everyday, and I alone in all humanity experienced nothing, it could never diminish the infinitude of God’s devotion to me. If in his wisdom God decides to cut me off from such experiences in order to toughen my faith – that essential ingredient of spiritual life, more valuable than earth’s treasures – it is yet another demonstration of his love. Faith in the unchangeable character of God is the only bedrock upon which a person’s spiritual life can be founded. We have no need for God to write in the sky because he has written in a book. And Jesus taught that people who fail to believe the Bible would not believe even if they experienced the ultimate miracle of someone they knew returning from the dead and speaking to them (Luke 16:27-31). I dare not slacken my quest for a deeper spiritual experience. I will welcome any manifestation of the Spirit of God in my life and not proudly assume I don’t need it, but if God decides not to use such means to prop up my spiritual life, it merely proves the depth of his confidence in me. He obviously believes I have the grit to tough it out by raw faith. ** God Love ** Our life needs not spectacular confirmation but spectacular commitment. What more could the One who died for you do to prove his love? Let’s not slander the Holy One by imagining infinite love is so fickle that it fluctuates according to a person’s physical attractiveness, popularity or talent. Whenever we eat, a child smiles at us, or we find shelter from the blazing sun or biting cold, we are experiencing God’s provision. Each day we receive literally millions of love gifts from God, and yet our hard heart and dull mind rarely overflows with awe at each expression of God’s personal love for us. If we could only open our eyes and begin to each day notice just a few of God’s innumerable love gifts to us, our enjoyment of life and awareness of how special we are to God would rocket heavenwards, bursting through the clouds into endless sunshine. Suppose a man gives the love of his life a beautiful engagement ring. She is so thrilled she can barely contain her joy and thankfulness and love for the man who would express his devotion in such a romantic way. Later, the man comes into great wealth. Remembering how much that gift meant to his darling, he decides to give her fifty carefully selected rings every day for the rest of her life. Each day’s gift of rings would soon begin to mean less and less to her. As time wears on, she could walk past her daily pile of rings, wondering if her husband really loves her. That’s like what has happened to us. Our Lord has been so extravagant in his display of love to us that we have become jaded to the real significance of the gifts he showers on us. When you snuggle into bed, hear a bird chirp, see a fluffy cloud, do you marvel at God’s love gifts to you? When, like the most faithful servant, a clock wakes you at just the right time; when you switch on a light that would have astonished everyone who was ever born until relatively recently; and when you look in a small mirror that King Solomon would have paid a fortune to own, does your heart skip a beat at the lengths your Father in heaven goes to say ‘I love you’? Or, like the worst spoilt child, do you just complain about how much your brothers and sister get? By making you feel as if God loves you less than certain other Christians, it seems as if Satan is attacking your self-esteem, but he isn’t. He is attacking the integrity of God. He is hissing that God’s love is so inadequate that it is only people who have certain qualities whom God can love or be gracious to. That’s a lie! God’s love toward you is perfect. God is for you. He’s cheering you on. He’s on your side! In this world, success is often relative – the closer the relative, the higher you go. Don’t decry the system: remember who you call Father. ** God Love ** Christian, you are the focus of divine love; filled with the majesty of Almighty God; spiritually enthroned with Christ in his heavenly palace; granted the highest level of access to the greatest Person, and the holiest place. You are the work of divine hands, made perfect in Christ Jesus. And enshrined within your being resides the infinite power of the sovereign Lord. Top fashion model Claudia Schiffer has been nominated the most beautiful woman in the world. Yet as a teenager, she concluded from her lack of popularity at school that she was not beautiful. We make a similar mistake in assuming that if we are not popular with people, we lack what it takes to make it in a big way with God. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 21:17:02 +0000
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