God Loves Us First
God loved Us First
God’s love is not a fickle love that depends on how we feel about him. His love for us does not depend on our capacity, history, or willingness. God’s love is a love that loved us before we could ever deserve it. As we see in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s love is actually one that loves us despite our actions to hurt him, loves us despite our continuous hatred, and despite our rooting ourselves in selfish greed and pride. God’s love is grace: it is a free gift that we never deserved and can never deserve. God loves us first so that His love might transform the brokenness and hatred that otherwise consume us.
God’s love does depend on us in some ways though. It does not depend on us to exist or to be expressed and shown. It does depend on us though, because we change how God’s love is received, taken in, and shared. Think of it like food. If we are so distracted by other things at the dinner table, we might miss that the food is there. If we refuse to open our mouths we can never take it in. If we aren’t present to what we eat, we might miss the flavour and richness in what we take in. Instead, we should long for and be watching for the rich food of God’s love. We should open our mouths, hearts, minds, and our whole lives, in such a way that we are willing to receive His love and take it in. Then we should take our time in that love and appreciate its flavour, richness, life, and gift. Do we take that time and focus to watch for God’s love and think on it, letting it shape our minds? Do we listen for it and digest it, letting it feed every part of us? Do we feel our experience of it and let that change our responses? It is not enough for love to be around us, just like it is not enough for love to surround us, it needs to be in us. It is not enough to live in God’s Kingdom, God has to reign in our hearts if we ever expect to belong, appreciate, or build up God’s Kingdom of love.
God loving first means that God’s love watches for opportunities to act. Love doesn’t wait for someone else to love, it doesn’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Love is mindful and purposeful acting when it has opportunity.
Out of love, God limits our evil, but he does not take it away. It would not be love for God to take away our mind, or our actions, or even the consequences of our actions. If God was to take away our mind that would be our destruction. If God was to take away our actions that would take away relationships. If God was to take away the consequence of our actions that would take away our purpose as we wouldn’t affect things and it would take away our meaning, because at that point we would have not meaningful interaction with anything. As we show ourselves to be less than loving, God does limit these things, however. He limits our minds, so that we cannot devise more evil ways to hurt him and this world. He limits our actions, so that we cannot grow in our hurting him and this world. He limits the consequences so we are not consumed by the death that would otherwise surround us. He also limits our lives, so that our evil does not exist and expand in perpetuity. This is already a way in which love uses opportunity to act. He is protecting us and him.
Even amid all of that brokenness, God will still act not just in ways to limit our evil, but also to expand our love. This means that God acts out love, even when it means sacrifice. God gives us opportunity and trusts us, even when we show ourselves to be anything but trusting. God gives us ability even when we may very well use it against him. Jesus’ arrest, trial, torture, and execution is a perfect example of this. Jesus came into this world so that we might meet and know God and God’s love. He did this full well knowing that we would kill him. God created and trusted all of these leaders, knowing that they would misuse that trust. God gave all of us ability to live out love, even though we would use that ability to turn away from, or act against him. God does this all, so that He could show us that He loves us in the midst of our brokenness. When there is practically nothing that is lovable. God takes the worst opportunity to show love, because ultimately it was the best opportunity to show the depth and power of His love. Jesus’ loves us first and it transformed the worst humanity could do, to show the greatest love humanity could ever know.
So, in this way, God loving first, wants to overcome what is otherwise not love. So, an important question to ask ourselves is: What do you love first? What is most important to you? What guides your actions, feelings, and thoughts? Suppose you let your position, status, relationships, and family determine how you live. In that case, you can easily become like the Pharisees and religious leaders, who saw Jesus and God threatening what they had created - because love challenges the way we relate to one another. If we love ourselves first we can easily become like the disciples who run from Jesus and fail to show Jesus love in the hard times, because things are threatening their life. If we love our way of life, the stuff, and authority, we can easily become like Pilate who gives in to all of this evil, because loving Jesus would have threatened everything He had and the way he lived. We need to love Jesus first, before anything else. We need his love to guide our actions, feelings, and thoughts. We need Jesus’ love to be the most important thing to us. Only then can it be like a positive infection in our lives.
The first essential step in living in God’s transformative love is to believe in Jesus’ love. We need to believe in its truth, presence, and potency. Without this belief, we will never see, receive, or act on it. Lacking belief doesn’t just mean missing God’s love, it actually means rejecting it. Look at Adam and Eve. In order for them to take that fruit they had to miss God’s love for them, they had to mistrust it and ultimately they had to reject that God’s command not to eat was a command of love. Were they thinking about all of this or understanding this as they took and ate the fruit, probably not, there lack of deliberate thoughtfulness was probably part of the problem but either way they were deciding not to believe God. Faith would have caused them to pause, to turn back to God, to ask him, to wait, think, pray, and more. Belief in God’s love does the same thing for us. We might not understand or even put together everything that is happening. Still, God’s love will call us to a different way of responding, receiving, searching, living in, and living out what God is faithfully giving us.
Just a simple example from life. If someone was to ask us for help, in a season when we are exhausted, stressed and we are struggling. Our common response would be to either let that pile of stuff stop us, or if it feels important enough we would just give in and get it done. If we believed in God’s love, however, that might utterly change our response. We would believe that God’s love is greater than our lack. It would call us to stop, pray, ask questions. It would likely lead to us walking beside that person and watching God act as we too gave sacrificially. This could take on many shapes, but it would ultimately mean putting that stuff that worries us aside and deliberately trusting God to act as we act.
This belief in God’s love can feel tough because it does challenge and change us, but that is actually its point. As tough as it is to take the first few steps of faith, realize that God in his love has already taken the first million steps of faith toward us. When we take those few steps of faith to God, he will lead us to rebirth - a new life where we can live in his love as he lives in us. A life where his love is written on our hearts, not as a commandment, but as our nature. Where His love lives in us as an entity that fills, empowers, and guides us. God wants us to be born of His Spirit so that we might fully comprehend, experience, and live out his love.
So, now, we are called to love first too. And we need to love first if we ever expect to get the world we want and hope for. It is a lot easier to love someone that loves you, but how do we ever get to that love if someone doesn’t already love us? One of us has to love first. Most people have hurt us at one point or another, but how do we get to that love unless someone is willing to lovingly forgive and look for reconciliation? It is so easy to let a wrong guide our thinking, like a endless cycle of confirmation bias, but if we don’t lovingly look for the good in someone, how will we ever stop living in the wrong? If we don’t love first, how will we ever look beyond our differences to see the unity and family God has created through faith in His Son? If we don’t love first, how will we ever be like God?
God loved us first. This is something we drastically need so that we might be pulled out of the stuff that otherwise buries us. This is the love that transforms our lives, relationships, actions, and thoughts. This is the love we are called to believe in, experience, know, and live out. This is the love that will change the world. Through faith in God’s love, we too can live out and live in this all-transforming love. God loved us first - So let us love one another. AMEN
God Loved First (Outline)
Meaning it doesn't depend on our capacity, ability, history - God loved us when we were at our worst
Though God's love does depend on us, because what we do changes how we receive it, take it in - do we hear it and digest it, do we see it and think on it, do we experience it and practice it - it is not enough for love to surround us it needs to be in us - it is not enough for us to Live in God's kingdom he has to reign in our hearts
Love these its opportunities to act
Love wants to overcome what is otherwise not love
What do you love first? Everything that isn't God is Evil
Belief in Jesus and His particular love is essential. In belief doesnt just mean not seeing his love it means rejecting it - Adam and Eve
Rebirth - God's love leads us to a new life where we might live in God and He in us. Commandments, Holy Spirit, Love for others
We need to love first - forgiveness - reconciliation - we always have a hand in it
Confirmation Bias?
Only way for us to love our brothers and sisters, because we are family in Christ - it doesn't matter if you worship in a different way, or come from a different country, experience, class, conservative or liberal - if Jesus is your Lord, God and saviour you are a brother and sister we all need to love.
Only way for us to be like God
