I have been listening to some awesome teaching by Jimmy Evans recently and encountered an amazing sermon on God's love. Whilst many of us feel we understand that God's love is perfect, that is the agape love that God gives us never fails or disappoints, what we often forget is that whilst we are able to portray aspects of God's love in our lives, we however are not always perfect. We may at times therefore disappoint those we love and care for.
God's love is also permanent, meaning that He will never withdraw nor remove His love from us despite how we feel or even act towards Him. This is best seen in Romans 5:8, "Christ died for us whilst we were still sinners." We however are vulnerable and will often choose to love based on our circumstances and experience. This is often because of the way we have been treated and the hurts that we have experienced in our lives.
God's love is also powerful, meaning it is able to bring changes and effect us in a way that restores us to how God intended us to be. We on the other hand are never truly able to display this kind of love in our humanness. Often the type of love that the world displays today is destructive rather than wanting to build others up.
Whilst it is easy to admit we cannot display this kind of love all the time, what is harder is to remember those who we love and who affect our lives are also unable to display this love towards us all the time. This to me is a great relief as I realise that people can never truly fulfil my needs for love, that there is only one who can, that is Jesus!
Whilst I could stop hear and say that's all, we are doomed to failure as we will never be able to give love as God gives love there is in fact more to this message. Paul tells us in Philippian's to "work out your salvation". A scripture which I battled with for many years in my life. Mainly as I understood the work that Christ did on the cross for us was "completed" and also as I believed not in a works minded mentality that is that we should work for our salvation knowing that Christ did it all on the cross. This however is not what Paul is saying, in fact when we study the context of the scripture we find that Paul is explaining that we need to put to work in our lives the power that Christ wrought for salvation on the cross.
Salvation in recent years as often been viewed simply as a decision we made after a two hour sermon and an emotional song induced altar call which we reluctantly responded to. As a new Christians pastor for many years I explained to those who made this decision that this was the first day of their new lives. Meaning the process has begun but there are still many steps we must take to continue on this journey of salvation. At this point many people will argue that we are perfect in Christ. And certainly when we are in Christ God's view of us is of the pure and spotless bride, yet it is also true that many of us come into this new found relationship with baggage. I would even argue that all of us have baggage and it is this baggage that God lovingly and graciously deals with throughout our lives.
What we often forgot is that God is truly interested in our souls/hearts/spirits more than he is interested in simply fuzzy feelings we experienced in an altar call to receive Christ as Lord. I am fully convinced that God allows us to experience hurt and pain (trials of many kind) so that through those experiences we are able to see our true character and the condition of our hearts. By this, when we are honest and humble to admit our failings (sins) we are then able to invite King Jesus to deal with our short comings and weaknesses.
Through it all, the Holy Spirit is able to work in our lives and produce the fruit that will remain, such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness..... when we invite him to do so.
God Bless
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