God loves us

God loves you. It is such a simple statement and yet, many of us have difficulty believing this.

When things go wrong in our lives, some of us blame God. Some of us have family and friends who try to comfort us by saying that this is "God's plan". They are well-meaning but the truth is that God does not teach us using sicknesses and problems. God teaches us by His Word. The sicknesses and set-backs did not come from God. It came from the devil. The Bible does not say that evil will not be meant towards us. The devil is always trying to turn us away from God by creating trouble in our lives. However, be of good cheer because God can turn the evil for our good. If we turn to the Lord and dwell in the shadow of His wings, a thousand may fall at our side and ten thousand at our right hand but it shall not come near us (Psalm 91). God is our shelter and our refuge. He will carry us through all the dangers and fears of our lives. We should trust in Him no matter how worried or fearful we are about the challenge that we are going through, by resting in Him and worshipping Him. Out of a situation which seems hopeless, God can bring about a miraculous breakthrough and we end up victorious. All we need to do is to believe.

It is not about how much we love God but about how much He loves us (1 John 4:10). We can never love Him as much as He loves us. He loved us so much that He sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. How many of us would willingly die as substitute to receive punishment on behalf of those whom we love? Jesus did. He came to earth as a Man to die for our sins. At the Cross, God took all our sicknesses and sins and placed them on the body of His precious Son. God's fire of judgment fell upon Jesus and roasted Him so that today, when we partake of the Holy Communion and discern Jesus' body, the power of God's blessing (including blessings of health and forgiveness of sins) can be released into our bodies and our lives.

God is love. He created the earth because He loves and He cares. He created people to love and He made us in His image. If we know and understand how much He loves us, we will love. We love because He first loved us. God knows that we are all unworthy people. When Adam fell in the Garden of Eden, sin and sickness came upon this world. God loves us so much and He wants us to walk in health and freedom from sin and condemnation that He sent His Son to die for us at the Cross (John 3:16). If we believe what Jesus has done for us at the Cross, we will have everlasting life, health, freedom from condemnation and we will walk in victory. Eternal life is God's life embodied in Christ given to all believers as a guarantee that they will live forever. When the rapture comes, we will all be given new bodies and taken up to be with the Lord. In eternal life, there is no death, sickness, enemy, evil nor sin. Our Christian walk leads us to eternity. Everything that there is in this world is temporal. What is from God is eternal.

Why, then, are there believers who do not have their breakthroughs? We need to remember that the devil is afraid of the Word and the blood of Jesus. The devil is always finding ways to distract us and to take our eyes off the Word. It is a constant struggle that we go through and we need to remember to keep our eyes on the Cross at all times. As we are humans, there may be times when we let our guard down and the evil one comes to take away the Word. When this happens, if we remain passive and do not resist the devil, we may find ourselves distracted by the cares of this world. Which one of us, by worrying, can solve the problem? When we encounter challenges in our lives, all the more we need to keep our eyes firmly fixed to the Cross and what Jesus has done for us and offer up our cares to the Lord. The battle is the Lord's, not ours. Before we make our petition to God, He already knows what we want to ask Him and He has already provided the victory for us, and when we speak to the Lord, He hears us (Isaiah 65:24). When we ask God for a breakthrough, believe in our hearts that our prayers have been answered. God will give us our miracles but He wants us to ask Him for it. He is a gentleman and He wants to give us the freedom to choose - do we choose to believe Him or to believe in our own self-efforts?

Let us know and rely on the love that God has for us (1 John 4:16). Let us believe that we are the son / daughter whom He loves. I have lost count of the number of times when Da and I have entered a very full car park in the building where the church is located, impatient drivers are sounding their horn or blocking the way (in a hope that a driver is on his way to his car to drive out of the the building), I ask Daddy God to bless us with a car park lot quickly so that we can go to church and right before our very eyes happens to be an empty car park lot in front of the entrance that leads us directly to the section of the building that we want to go to. As Da reverses our car easily into the car park lot, we see other cars passing us by and the look on these drivers' faces say, "That lucky couple! How did they manage to get such a good car park lot so easily when I have been circling this car park for some time?". Praise the Lord for He is so good to us!

What, then, is love? 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 says that love is patient and kind, it does not envy, boast nor keep record of wrongs and it is not proud, rude, self-seeking, easily angered nor does it delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres. God's kind of love is directed outward towards others and not inward towards ourselves. The more we know how much God loves us, the more we become like Christ and the more love we will show to others while expecting nothing in return. God is always waiting for us to see His love for us so that He can bless us. The Holy Spirit came to condemn us only of one sin - the sin of unbelief. All other sins have been judged on the body of Jesus at the Cross. There is therefore nothing for us to do except to believe. It sounds simple, does it not? God uses the weak to confound the mighty. Where our weakness is, God can use it to His glory. All He asks is that we offer up to Him whatever little we have and He will turn it for our good and bring us into victory.

The law (that is, the Ten Commandments) cannot make us holy. The law is like a mirror - it reflects our sins. If we are alone in a room with a side door and there is a note on the door that says, "Do not open.", what is the natural reaction of many people? To open the door. If there are no laws, our sins will not be revealed because we would not know that it is a sin that we have committed. The way to repentance is not to preach more of the law. The more that the law is preached, the more people will sin because they will think, "The situation is already so hopeless for me. I cannot keep the Ten Commandments, so I might as well continue with what I am doing because I am a sinner and I am going to hell anyway.". It is the love of God and not the preaching of the law that leads us to repentance.

What, in a nutshell, is the law trying to teach us? It is two-fold:-

(a) We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul and all our strength (Deuteronomy 6:5); and

(b) We are to love our neighbours as yourselves (Leviticus 19:18).

When the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”, Jesus said to them, “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40). It is essentially all about love. When we know how much God loves us, we will love others around us, including our enemies. It is difficult to be filled with the love of God and yet scheme to backstab a friend, colleague or relative. People who do this do not really believe that God loves them, despite what they may say.

We live in a fallen world and we are all unworthy people. If we are worthy and sinless, we will not need Jesus to be our Redeemer and our Saviour and He would have died in vain. God showed His love towards us in that while we were still sinners, He sent His Son to die for us (Romans 5:8). God sent Jesus to die for us, not because we were good enough, but because He loved us and did not want us to suffer the punishment that God (being just) has to mete out for our sins. Jesus did not come to save the worthy. He came to save the sinners. When we know and believe that all our sins have been forgiven at the Cross, it will not give us a licence to sin. Instead, it will make us love the Lord more and want to know Him more and find out more about the blessings that are in store for us so that we can claim them. Whenever we feel down and unloved, remember that even before we turned to the Lord and loved the Lord, He already loved us. If God loved us when we were still sinners, He will surely strengthen us to go and sin no more.

Jesus is always with us. No tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, peril or evil can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ our Lord. We are more than conquerors through the Lord who loves us (Romans 8:35-39). Do not let the devil rob us of the love of God. The serpent's head has been crushed under the foot of Jesus. The Lord loves us and He will never leave us. He is always with us everywhere we go even though we may not always feel it. No matter what happens to us, no matter where we are, we can never be lost to His love. Sometimes when we are going through a challenge, the Lord seems so far away and even though we have not lost our faith, at such times we find it difficult to pray. Even if we want to pray, we do not know where to start nor what to say. However, the Lord will give us the Grace to worship Him with all our heart. Even in our darkest hour and amidst our deepest pain, we should lift our voices in praise to the Lord and honour Him because His Word is truth and it will come to pass in our lives. We should put our trust in the Lord knowing that He died to set us free. Trials and tribulations should not turn us away from the Lord but instead help us to turn towards Him even more and to ask Him to deliver us so that His love can reach us and heal us.

Faith comes by hearing and hearing of the Word of Christ. Let us know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19). God's love for us is higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans! It is not enough to go around saying, "God loves me" just for the sake of saying it. The question is, do you believe with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength that the Lord really, really, really loves you? Do you believe that when you do something wrong which you did not intend to, God still loves you despite this and He has forgiven you?

Jesus said that whoever God gives to Jesus will go to Jesus and the one who goes to Jesus, He will never cast out (John 6:37). Jesus came to do the will of God. When we accept Christ into our lives, we become children of the Most High God. We belong to God and He has given us His precious Son. Jesus will never leave us nor forsake us. Even when we are going through a difficult time in our lives, look to the Cross and believe. The Lord will come through for us.

I love You, Lord... because You first loved me. Amen.