God’s Love...The Fuel We Require to Live
The love of God is often preached about and yet the majority of us have misunderstood this God kind of love. We don’t function without His love, and we tend to confuse it with human love. Join Paul in this short video to find out why God’s love is a requirement for your life!
In all my years as a Christian, the love of God has been one of the most widely taught and preached about topics. Yet, it is still the most misunderstood concept of the Bible. The Bible teaches that “...God is love.” 1 John 4:8b (NIV) We know this verse, right? But what does it really mean? It means that God's very essence is love. Love is not something that God has, that He distributes to those He wants to in greater or lesser amounts.
Love is who God is and the Life of God is a Life of love.
When we come to God through Jesus, we enter into this Life of love. All of us do. But here's the problem...even though we know that our number one basic need as human beings is to be loved, the vast majority of us are totally unfamiliar with this God kind of love.
We don't know what it is or what to do with it. More importantly, we don't even function properly without it.
God's Life of love is the fuel we require to live!
We hear much in our Christian circles that we must love people, right? Our neighbours, our brothers, sisters, we need to love our pastors, and our families. The list is endless. We are even instructed to love our enemies. How do we even do that?
We begin our relationship with God bringing our very conditional human kind of love, which really isn't love at all. See, I say “I love you” but only as long as you treat me the way I want you to treat me. If you start treating me badly, it won't be long before I withdraw my love for you. Despite our lifelong vows, we see this in broken marriages all the time.
The Bible says, “We love because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 (NIV) Did you get that? A better translation might say, “We do not have the ability to love unless we first receive His love.”
We need to receive His love...that’s the fuel!
God's kind of love is unconditional and we think we know that. But do we really? This means there's nothing you and I can do to make God love us more. And conversely, there's nothing you and I can do to make God love us less. Isn't that amazing?
God loves you. And it’s not based on your good or bad behaviour.
Rather, He loves you based on who He is! Friends, we don't have much of a choice in the matter. It's not up to us! We simply need to receive God's love. This is a difficult thing for many people because when you receive something, you're not in control. And we love to be in control, don’t we?
For His love to flow through you, relinquish control over to Him so He can indiscriminately love whomever He wants to through you.
Will you give Him that control today? Will you receive His love? You won't regret it!
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