updated 1-17-16
I
have read that passage numerous times without realizing the significance of it,
but it finally hit me...wow! We as
believers are truly blessed with an amazing and incredible love from our Father
that He would adopt us as children and
fellow heirs with Christ! All praise be
to Him! Let His amazing love, grace, and
mercy motivate us to faithful love and obedience to our Savior, for He is
worthy!
“God is
love. By this the love of God is
manifested in us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we
might live through Him. In this is love,
not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins.”
1 John 4:8-10
“But
when the kindness
of God our Savior
and His love for mankind appeared, He
saved us, not on the basis
of deeds which
we have done in righteousness,
but according to His mercy,
by the washing of regeneration
and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured
out upon us richly through Jesus Christ
our Savior, so
that being justified by His grace
we would be made heirs according to the hope
of eternal life.”
Titus
3:4-7
"Who
is a God like you, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of
the remnant of his possession? He does
not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love. He will again have compassion on us; He will
tread our iniquities under foot. Yes,
You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
Micah
7:18-19
Adam and Eve
were created perfect and sinless. God
told them they could eat of any tree in the Garden of Eden except for one, and
said in Genesis 2:17, "For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely
die." They sinned and disobeyed
God's command to not eat of the fruit, and God had every right to kill them
right then and there and end the human race!
But God had mercy on the human race and He delayed His judgment of death
on Adam and Eve, who did not die physically until years later.
They did,
however, die spiritually on that day; and now mankind, instead of being born perfect
and sinless, is born depraved and in bondage to sin, and is in need of a Savior. Romans 6:23 condemns all of mankind when it
says that, "the wages of sin is death." But God, in His incredible
love and mercy, has provided us a Savior: Jesus Christ, God Himself, to save us
from the death that our sins deserve.
Paul Washer
says this from The Gospel's Power and Message: "We were a fallen and
sinful race. We had made our decision,
declared our independence, and charted our own course for destruction. There was no virtue in us that He should seek
us out, nor was there any worth in us that He should redeem us...Yet he has
opened the door of salvation to every tribe, tongue, people, and nation through
a most costly payment—the precious blood of his only Son."
“The LORD,
the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear
the guilty."
Exodus 34:6
God is a God
who loves, but He is also a holy and righteous God who hates sin and must
punish sin—make sure you understand that; but
also know that He does not want everyone to sin just so He can punish them to
hell. 1 Timothy 2:4 says God
"desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the
truth." Ezekiel 18:32 tells us,
"'For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies,' declares the
LORD GOD. 'Therefore, repent and
live.'" He has graciously made a
way out for our sins: we must transformed by the Holy Spirit so we can repent
and believe in Jesus Christ.
Isaiah 30:18
says, "Therefore the LORD longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He
waits on high to have compassion. For
the LORD is a God of justice; how blessed are all those who long for Him.” The parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15
also shows how God is anxious for us to repent so He can show His grace and forgiveness. The prodigal son moved away from home and
squandered away his father's inheritance in living a life of sin to the point
of where he had no money and no food to eat.
It was then that he came to his senses to go back to his father:
"I will
get up and go to my father and will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against
heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me
as one of your hired men.' So he got up
and came to his father. But while he was
still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran
and embraced him and kissed him. And the
son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am
no longer worthy to be called your son.'
But the Father said to his slaves, 'Quickly bring out the best robe and
put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the
fattened calf, kill it, and let us celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and
has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.' And they began to celebrate.”
Luke 15:18-24
The father in
the story is like our Father in heaven who wants us to repent. The grace and mercy of God the Father is
great. Psalm 145:8-9 says, "The
LORD is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and great in lovingkindness. The LORD is good to all, and His mercies are
over all His works." Ephesians
2:1-3 says we were dead in our sins and were children of wrath, but v. 4-5
says, "But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which
He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive
together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).
Man often has
a problem with the great love and mercy of God.
The brother of the prodigal son did not want to forgive his brother, and
neither did Jonah want forgiveness to be extended to the people of Nineveh. Jonah was a prophet of God who wished for God
to judge and destroy the people of Nineveh, and he was mad when God did
not. God made Jonah a shade tree for a
day and then a worm came the next morning and destroyed the tree, which made
Jonah even more angry. God did this to
teach Jonah about His love in Jonah 4:10-11: "You had compassion on the
plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which
came up overnight and perished overnight.
Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there
are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their
right and left hand, as well as many animals?"
Unlike Jonah
and the shade tree, God did create
the people of Nineveh. He did cause them
to grow and He sustained them just as He does for us today. He is not a God who is distant from His
creation, for He shows His mercy and care for all men. Jesus says of God
the Father in Luke 6:35, "For He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil
men," and in Matthew 5:45, "For He causes His sun to rise on the evil
and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."
God is both imminent and
transcendent. He is transcendent in His
holiness, because He is so far above us that He is not like us at all. But he is not a distant God. He is imminent and close to us when we humble
ourselves before Him. Isaiah 57:15 says,
"For thus says the high and exalted One who lives forever, whose name is
Holy, 'I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly
of spirit in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of
the contrite.'"
David talked
about God's love and care for him in Psalm 23:1-3, "The LORD is my shepherd,
I shall not want. He makes me lie down
in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the
paths of righteousness for His name's sake."
It is easier
to understand God's love once you have children of your own. You love your children because they are
yours. You love unconditionally and are
patient with their mistakes. You are not
looking to punish them, but you will
punish them for their disobedience—not out of hatred, but out of your love for
them, to teach them to do what is right.
When they grow up, you still love them and want to continue to be in
fellowship with them, and it would break your heart if they rebelled against
all you had tried to teach them and if they wanted to have nothing to do with
you. Yet in their defiance, you would still
bend over backward to try to help them to see the error of their ways and to
restore the relationship you once had.
Paul
Washer noted, "No one has ever loved man like God. And no one has ever hated God like man. 'For God so loved the world that He gave His
only begotten Son,' and the world so hated God that they killed Him."
'For God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son,' and the world so hated God that they killed Him.
James
Montgomery Boice wrote, “Augustine once called the cross ‘a pulpit’ from which
Christ preached God’s love to the world” (Foundations of the Christian Faith,
p.332). God's love is amazing and it should inspire us
to love Him as well.
If a man
commits a crime against a stranger, we know that to be wrong. But, if a man commits the same crime against
his own mother, we know that to be even worse.
Further, we find out about the details of the mother's love for the man
through the years in spite of his wickedness, and that makes the crime even
more heinous. It is for the same reason
that our sin is so evil. When we sin, it
is not against some stranger who could care less about us. No, when we sin, we sin against the God who
created us and loves us more than we can ever know.
"The
LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number
than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples but because the
LORD loved you."
Deuteronomy
7:7-8
Paul
Washer in The Gospel's Power and Message
says, "The only explanation for God's special love for Israel must rest in
God Himself: He loved them because He loved them. Merit did not prompt His love." It is the same way today for everyone, both
Jew and Gentile. God's amazing love is
not poured out on those who are worthy, but on those who are unworthy.
“He
saved us, not on the basis
of deeds which
we have done in righteousness,
but according to His mercy,
by the washing of regeneration
and renewing by the Holy Spirit.”
Titus
3:5
We know from Isaiah 64:6 that, “all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.” God did not save us because we were good, nor
did we earn salvation because of our good works. He was motivated by His great and incredible
love for us and we are saved us by His grace and mercy alone. It is only after we first learn of God's
holiness and justice contrasted with our own depravity that we can begin to
understand how great is His mercy and love toward us.
We are not only given an amazing
salvation, but God the Father adopts us as His children; and furthermore we are
made heirs with Christ!
"For all who are being led by the
Spirit of God, these are sons of God....You have received a spirit of adoption
as sons...The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of
God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if
indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him."
Romans 8:14-17
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