The God that Loves Us
This is how God’s love for us was revealed: God has sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we may live through him. This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us so much, we also should love one another. (1 John 4:9–11)
This last Sunday we celebrated Mother’s Day. Mothers love their children like no one else. They want what is best for their children and they’ll go to almost any length to make sure that their children are taken care of. Mothers also make sure that their children are respectful and well-behaved. Sometimes that means that they have to discipline their children. They discipline their children because they love them.
God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. He wants us to be his children, but God also demands perfection from us. He does not tolerate sin. It severs the bond that humans once had with God. It turned us from children of God to enemies of God. And nothing we did could restore that bond.
But God loved us so much that he sent his holy and perfect Son, Jesus, to this world to live the perfect life we could not live and to die the death that we deserved. He was the one who paid for our sins. It is only through him that we can once again be called children of God. He is the sacrifice that makes us at one with God.
Because of that love shown to us, we also want to love others. We want to show them the love that God had for us. We want to love them in whatever way we can, especially by pointing them to the God who loves them. We love because God, who is love, loved us first. Amen.
The song for today is “Love Moved First” by Casting Crowns