God is Love, even in the darkest of times.
IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING
Every so often a truth you have known and recited for years suddenly comes alive. This was the case for me lately regarding the simple statement repeated throughout the Bible: God is love. I have believed this as truth and as a concept, but lately the implications of this brought real change in the way I look at life.
I understood that it was God’s nature to love. His love represents who He is. He can’t act in any other way. Therefore, everything He thinks, feels, and does is a direct result of His unending love. Yes, there’s the flip side—His righteousness, but His love and His righteousness are not opposites, even though they may appear to be as in our salvation. On the one hand, God is loving and merciful and doesn’t want to punish us. On the other hand, His righteousness demands that sin be punished. Since we’re all sinners, it looks like God has a problem. How can He be righteous and merciful to us at the same time? In this case, He solved the apparent dilemma by sending His Son to die in our place on the cross.
The point is that God’s love was displayed through His righteousness. He didn’t satisfy His righteous
demands in spite of His love. He satisfied them through His love. This brings me to my epiphany. I came to understand that every expression of God’s will that He allows in my life will be an expression of His perfect love. It’s not as though some really rotten stuff will happen to me and God will love me through it. God really cares for me they way His Word says. Check out Matthew 6: 25-34. This means that we can’t separate God’s perfect love for us from the rotten stuff that happens to us.
AS I SEE IT
I think we all tend to experience God’s love in the good times and forget about
it in the bad. We get so bent out of shape when the trials hit that we can’t think straight, spiritually speaking. That’s exactly the time we need to apply God’s love and let it carry us above all the difficulties. The same wave that nearly drowns a swimmer is a thing of beauty to the surfer. The surfboard is like God’s love. When we learn how to use it properly, it will take us on an exciting adventure.
I write a lot about trials because they are a part of life, and now we can look at them as being filtered through God’s love, regardless of the pain. My ultimate goal is to regularly experience the joy that comes, not from avoiding the trials, but by overcoming them. Believers experience real joy after winning the victory. Romans 8:37 sums it up beautifully:
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
GOD DISPLAYS HIS GLORY
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