God’s Love For Us

  Posted on September 12, 2018  by   No comments

1 John 4:7-11  ⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

In the book “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis, he takes on the question that Christians have been asking for centuries, “If God is good and all powerful why does He allow His creatures to suffer pain.”  It is a great question and one I have asked myself on numerous occasions.  However that is not the question I am going to tackle today.

In the book C.S. Lewis talks about the love God has for us.  The question I have been thinking about is another one C.S. Lewis talked about, ‘Did God create us so we can love Him, or did He create us so He can love us?’

We know the love we have for God.  He did create us so we can love Him.  He even gave us the free will to love Him or not.  We show that love by helping people in need.  We show it by worshiping Him, by trying to follow His will, and living a life that is pleasing to Him.  We show Him love by surrendering our lives to Him and even becoming outcasts because of His name.  We show Him the same love that a child shows to a parent.  But we don’t always consider His love for us.

What I mean is, we do things to show our love to Him but don’t always consider the things He has done to show His love for us.  Take the law for example.  He has given us the law to follow, but we only think it holds us down instead of showing that He loves us and doesn’t want us hurt.  We don’t make rules for our children to hold them down, we make rules so they don’t hurt themselves and to show our love for them.  C.S. Lewis wrote “To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are, is to ask that God should cease to be God.”  God’s love is displayed throughout the Bible and to have the Bible itself to read, study, and pour over shows His love.  The biggest thing God did to show His love was to come down from Heaven and be crucified so to bridge the gap from our sinful state to His glorified presence.  I am so thankful for a God that wants to love us and shows His love for us in so many ways.

Ephesians 2: 4-7  ⁴ But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, ⁵ even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—⁶ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷ so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Blessings, Paul Gilbertson