We know John 3:16. We know how much God loves us, that He sent Jesus Christ to die for our sins in order to restore us to our position in the spiritual hierarchy. (Refer to previous post) God’s love is beyond human understanding. God is very wise, He is a genius. We use a few years just to study a certain aspect of God’s creation. However, God doesn’t purposely want to be complicated. He wants us to know Him better. Being children of God, we are privileged to enjoy our ‘royalty’ position which we ourselves do not have to earn it.All this because God’s love is unconditional and overflowing that whoever believes in Him and accepts Jesus Christ as his Saviour will have such privilege.
God first loves us, therefore we love. He is the source of love and by reciprocating His love to us, we love Him back. In the small little things we do everyday in our lives, we are actually showing how God’s love lives in us and at the same time loving Him. We go to church, we come to CF, we worship Him, we study His words, all this simply shows our love to God.
The main reason we love God is because we want to love Him, not because we want to earn something from Him. Typical Asian culture roots in our mind since young, telling us that everything which is good needs to be earned and reward comes hand in hand with it, like the law of sowing and reaping. But when we love God, we don’t love Him with theintention of wanting to be loved more. God looks at the heart, so we love him genuinely from the heart. And the whole point is that He’s already given us His love; we have been loved from the very beginning and will always be. We don’t have to ask for more. God’s perfect love comes from zero percent of our hardwork. As long as we are children of God, His love is already our eternal inheritance.
However, we can do greater things than that. God, through His love in us, wants us to live out His words without fear. Many Christians live in fear. We fear that when sometimes we do things like loving our enemies, we may be perceived by the worldly people as hypocrites or not conformed to the norm. We fear of not being acknowledged, not being appreciated and being rejected especially when telling the non-believers about how awesome God is and how we are redeemed through Christ. We fear that by saying such straightforward yet ultimate truth, we will have to bear the rejection. More often we tend to rather say things euphemistically. In short, we subconsciously do things with fear and this is not perfect love. In fact, when a person rejects the Good News that you share to him, he is actually rejecting God’s love. It’s between that individual and God. So why we fear?
The Bible says perfect love casts out fear because fear has to do with punishment. (1 John 4:18) Therefore, we have to stop being afraid of the right thing that the Holy Spirit tells us to do. Our responsibility is to preach the gospel. Reach out to people not out of fear, do evangelism not out of fear. Fear doesn’t reflect perfect love. We need to get the truth of we being so loved by God very deeply until it becomes our default point. Don’t feel condemned. Whenever we fear, we go back to God, allow His prefect love to dwell in us and help us to wipe out the negative within us. Instead of letting the Asian typical mindset to control our thinking, we ask the Holy Spirit to assure us intuitively that our position is already restored and hence we can be comfortable with our new identity in Christ.
We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). Another way to love God is by making disciples and this requires us to be disciples first. Making disciples can take our lives thus it is like the love that Jesus displayed to mankind. However, being a Christian is not like a competition. It’s not valued and measured by how much we do (or how many disciples we make etc) because everything we manage to do comes from God, if His will allows that. The glory eventually belongs to Him.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16) As we know that we are loved, we are children of God, it prompts us want to love more. We need not fear because nothing can separate us from God, not our past, present or future. (Romans 8:38-39) (God’s) Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:8) So, let us not love by merely saying but by appropriate actions. (1 John 3:18)
P.S. Read John 14,15,16 too. Don’t just read one chapter, read the whole text to get the full picture. Or else if you just focus on one aspect like if you love Me you will obey my commands, you’ll feel that you are a terrible person who doesn’t deserve God’s love. :D
By Faithful~
