GOD LOVES….ME?
GENESIS 22:1-14; HOSEA 11:1-4; 8-9; HOSEA 14:4-7
One of the incredible truths of the word of God is the height and depth and breadth of love that God had for man. The Psalmist writes in amazement of this truth, of all that God has done for man. (Psalm 8:3-8)
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.
What is man that thou art mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
And crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands,
You put everything under his feet;
All flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air and the fish of the sea, all that swim in the paths of the sea.”
In return for such a place of honor, man responded by failing to obey the one and only command of God. And like the case of our earthly parents, our heavenly Father had to discipline, to punish…but He did not utterly wipe out man. He could have cosmically erased us and begun again.
And so God began a heavenly plan wherein His son, both man and God would take the place we deserved, received the punishment we deserved. And provide a pathway back into a loving relationship with God to last for all eternity.
In a sense, that is what the Bible is all about. It’s about the love of God…. and it’s about our struggle to understand and learn to accept that love. There are three things we need to do: REALIZE THE LOVE OF GOD, RETURN TO THE LOVE OF GOD and REFLECT THE LOVE OF GOD.
REALIZE THE LOVE OF GOD
I think the first step for all of us is to accept Christ as Lord and Savior. I then think the next challenging step that lasts our entire lives is to walk a walk and live a life that shows that Jesus is in fact Lord and Savior. And one of the necessary truth that we have to realize in our mind and more importantly in our heart is simply this.
God…loves….ME.
The strongest and most critical truths are taught in those early formative years. Remember the words to this?
JESUS LOVES ME
THIS I KNOW
FOR THE BIBLE
TELLS ME SO
LITTLE ONES TO HIM BELONG
THEY ARE WEAK
BUT HE IS STRONG
YES, JESUS LOVES ME
YES, JESUS LOVES ME
YES, JESUS LOVES ME
THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO
Do you ever feel like saying those words differently?
JESUS LOVES….ME????
CAN IT BE?
I CAN’T SEE
WHY HE’D LOVE ME
HE IS GOOD
AND I’M SO BAD
I FOREVER MAKE HIM SAD.
HOW CAN JESUS LOVE ME?
HOW CAN JESUS LOVE ME?
HOW CAN JESUS LOVE ME?
E’EN THOUGH THE BIBLE SAYS IT’S SO
JESUS LOVES….ME!!! GOD LOVES….ME!!Sometimes, that’s hard for us to believe…sometimes that hard to accept. Two reasons for the difficulty we have in accepting the love of God are captured in a verse of the hymn “Beneath the Cross of Jesus”
“Two wonders I confess
The wonder of his redeeming love
And my own worthlessness”
The wonder of God’s unfailing love…we have to grapple with the infiniteness of God’s ability to love.
In September of 1982, my Mother passed away very unexpectedly. Through a series of events, I was actually spending the weekend at my parent’s home sick with a stomach flu, in order that my wife would be able to work and get a good night’s sleep. Early on the Sunday morning, my mother had a stroke and was gone in an instant. That was a heart-breaking time, because of the love I had, as any son has for his mother…and it had made having my father still alive that much more precious.
My mother was very quiet and private about her accomplishments, but one of the significant things she did was to open one of the first art galleries exclusively for Atlantic Canada artists in the City of Saint John. One of the most beautiful tributes to my mother following her death was what became known as the Barbara Ring Memorial Collection. Every artist that had been a client of my mother’s gallery either painted a work for specific donation, or donated a selected work of art. With only a few exceptions donated by our family, major artists of New Brunswick and the other Atlantic Provinces were represented. That showed a special kind of love.
As powerful as that act of love was…as powerful as the love of a son, of a husband, of a daughter-in-law for my mother…there is a biblical truth that needs to be realized.
God loves us more than that.
An Eight year old wrote about love and true love.
Love is when Daddy reads me a bedtime story.
True love is when he doesn’t skip any of the pages.
A story that J. Vernon McGee relates under the heading “THE DARK SIDE OF LOVE” helps explain this a little better.
A child lay restless in her bed. A man, with a very severe and stern look, stealthily entered her bedroom and softly approached her bed. The little began to scream. Her mother rushed into the room and went over to her. The trembling child threw her arms about her mother.
The man withdrew to the telephone, called someone, who was evidently an accomplice, and in a very soft voice made some sort of an arrangement. Hastily the man reentered the room, tore the child from the mother’s arms, and rushed out to a waiting car. The child was sobbing, and he attempted to stifle her cries. He drove madly down street after street until he finally pulled up before a large, sinister, and foreboding-looking building. All was quiet, the building was partially dark, but there was one room upstairs ablaze with light.
The child was hurriedly taken inside, up to the lighted room, and put into the hands of the man with whom the conversation had been held over the telephone in the hallway. In turn, the child was handed over to another accomplice—this time a woman—and these two took her into an inner room. The man who had brought her was left outside in the hallway. Inside the room, the man plunged a gleaming, sharp knife into the vitals of that little child, and she lay as if she were dead.
Your reaction at this point may be, “I certainly hope they will catch the criminal who abducted the little girl and is responsible for such an awful crime!”
However, I have not related to you the sadistic crime of a psychopathic criminal. On the contrary, I have described to you a tender act of love. Let me fill in some of the details.
You see, that little girl had awakened in the night with severe abdominal pain. The doctor had told her parents to watch her very carefully, because she was suffering for appendicitis. It was her father who had hurried into the room. When he saw the suffering of his little girl, he went to the telephone, called the family physician, and arranged to meet him at the hospital. He then rushed the little girl down to the hospital and handed her over to the physician who took her to the operating room and performed emergency surgery.
Through it all, every move and every act of that father was of tender love, anxious care, and wise decision. I have described to you the dark side of love—but love, nevertheless. The father loved the child just as much on that dark night when he took her to the hospital and delivered her to the surgeon’s knife as he did the next week when he brought her flowers and candy. It was just as much a demonstration of deep affection when he delivered her into the hands of the surgeon as it was the next week when he brought her home and delivered her into the arms of her mother.
Is there no other way, Oh, God,
Except through sorrow, pain and loss,
To stamp Christ’s likeness on my soul,
No other way except the cross?
And then a voice stills all my soul,
As stilled the waves of Galilee.
Can’st thou not bear the furnace,
If midst the flames I walk with thee?
I bore the cross, I know its weight;
I drank the cup I hold for thee.
Can’st thou not follow where I lead?
I’ll give thee strength, lean hard on Me!
The passage from Genesis 22 paints a prophetic portrait of the ultimate sacrifice of love. God becoming man, suffering the humiliation of total rejection and death in order to provide a path of salvation, a return to the presence of God unhampered by the sin nature. But just as God love the first man and women enough to allow them to choose to love Him back, so the offering of salvation is just that…an offering. Consider for a moment the fact that God chose to do this thing, and needed to share the experience. God was actually doing two things in his test of Abraham. He was testing Abraham faithfulness and obedience by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, but secondly, God was giving Abraham something few men who walked with God experience. A look at the heart and feeling of God…Abraham would discover exactly how God would feel centuries later when God’s own son was led to the top of that same mountain, carrying wood – a cross on his back, offered up as a sacrifice.
The difference was that in Abraham’s case there was the hand of God that stopped him from the actual act of sacrifice. There was no hand above God to stop Him, to provide an alternative.
“For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whomsoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
RETURN TO THE LOVE OF GOD
Every prophet of the Old Testament preached the following messages:
(1) God Loves You.
(2) You have rebelled against or turned away from God.
(3) You will be punished or disciplined for God desires and deserves your worship.
(4) But God will always love you and show mercy that you do not deserve. Therefore RETURN TO God.
The book of Hosea can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters focus on Hosea and a marriage commanded by God. Hosea marries Gomer, a women who will prove time and time again to be unfaithful to him. She will father children out of wedlock, and she will desert Hosea. But Hosea is commanded to buy back Gomer, who sells herself as a slave prostitute.
So too God’s love remains for Israel.
Verses 2-3 = The people did not acknowledge God. They were going through the motions, and yet didn’t recognize anything that God did for them. Theirs was a formality with faithfulness a façade without love. They worshipped God on the Sabbath, but engaged in idol worship the rest of the time.
When two events come into conflict, which do you choose? I will not be that you don’t love God, but whom do you serve?
“Choose you this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Is the credo of the true Christian home
Verse 4 = cords of love God used to draw them.
Verse 8 = God’s response. “How shall I give you up?” God promises not to utterly destroy Ephraim despite their disobedience, their rebellion, their unappreciative ness.
How can God do this if he is holy, especially in the past judgment of God on cities like Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim.
How does he include them in his life when they have been so rebelliousness?
The answer is Calvary, where God judges sin absolutely and completely.
REFLECT THE LOVE OF GOD
Jesus said “I am the light of the world.” But He also said elsewhere in scripture, speaking of the disciples, “You are the light of the world.” The meaning is clear in the context. Jesus is the source, but the disciples were to reflect, to show forth the love of God by loving others. When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was he responded. “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul, and the second is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself.” God first, others second, ourselves last.
CONCLUSION
It was Spurgeon who noticed a weather vane that a farmer had on his barn. It was an unusual weather vane, for on it the farmer had the words, GOD IS LOVE. Mr. Spurgeon asked him, “Do you mean by this that God’s love is as changeable as the wind?” The farmer shook his head. “No,” he said, “I do not mean that God’s love changes like that. I mean that whichever way the wind blows, God is love.”
Today it may be the soft wind from the south that He brings to blow across your life, for He loves you. But tomorrow He may let the cold blasts from the north blow over your life—and if He does, He still loves you.
