THE UNFATHOMABLE POWER OF GOD’S LOVE TOWARDS US

IN THE DAYS OF HIS POWER SERIES.

TOPIC: THE UNFATHOMABLE POWER OF GOD’S LOVE TOWARDS US

COMPILED/EDITED BY-:
Rev. Innocent Chukwudi Peace-Udochukwu President Living Fountain Ministries Int’l LIFOM

“I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me”
John 17:23

SUMMARY
God’s great love for us in Christ Jesus our Lord enables us to be more than conquerors through every trial for His sake.

God’s great love for us is not diminished or terminated by our failures, shortcomings, or sins, because it goes back to God’s choice of us before the foundation of the world.

Paul roots our salvation in God’s loving choice of us according to His plan before He made the world (see also, Eph. 1:4-5). At a point in our lives, He called us according to His purpose to conform us to the image of His Son, so that He would have the preeminence.
In fact, He loved us so much that He delivered up His own Son for us on the cross. Since God did all of this for us while we were yet sinners (Rom. 5:8), His love for us is not conditioned on our worthiness or our performance. We can’t earn or deserve His love. Rather, it stems from His very nature, “for God is love” (1 John 4:8).

One of the most vivid characteristics of God is that he is a God of love. The Psalmist was descriptive in recording the love-nature of God. He stated that he was “full of faithful love” (Psalm 103:8), “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His faithful love toward those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:11), “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:13), and “But from eternity to eternity the LORD’s faithful love is toward those who fear Him” (Psalm 103:17).

The point is not simply that God “loves,” but that he is love itself. Love is not merely one of his attributes, but his very nature. The Scripture say, “And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him” (1 John 4:16).

No truth will transform your life more than God’s gracious love for you in Christ. To the extent that you understand it, feel it, and live daily with a deep sense of its reality, you will live in victory over temptation and sin and be able joyfully to persevere through trials. And so Paul brings us onto the summit of God’s love by asking and answering his sixth and seventh rhetorical questions:

(1) “What then shall we say to these things?” (8:31a)

(2) “If God is for us, who is against us?” (8:31b)

(3) “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (8:32)

(4) “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?” (8:33a)

(5) “God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns?” (8:33b-34a)

(6) “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” (8:35a)

(7) “Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (8:35b)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

• John 3:16

Spiritually God’s love removes the barrier that separates us from him by canceling the debt of our sin so that we can enjoy a loving relationship with him. God’s love removes our sins as though they never existed.

Much of our physical and emotional illness is due to moral failure. In removing the sin and guilt from our lives God’s love brings healing to our emotional life.

The pit is the pit of death. God’s love rescues us, fallen humanity, from our own bent on destruction, and grants us eternal life.

God’s love places a crown of royal glory and authority on us. God’s love “. . . made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father” (Rev. 1:6). He have been crowned with his love and given a new citizenship on this earth and in heaven.

Here we find a major difference between divine love and what so often passes for love among people. Often, love is expressed as that virtue that accepts everything. But, God’s love always makes judgment calls. Divine love hates what is wrong and embraces what is right.

When God says I love you, he is saying that you matter to him. You are a person of worth. You are valuable to him. Regardless of what others think, in his eyes you are wonderful.

“No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends”
(John 15:13).

Agape love is love at the highest level. It’s so much more than we could ever dream or imagine. It is selfless, sacrificial love is spoken of over 200 times in the Bible. Here is everything you need to know about God’s perfect, unconditional agape love for us.
Our world has many definitions of love, but we most commonly think about love in a romantic sense. What if love, true love, meant more than romance? What if there was a deeper, truer, more full expression of love that could only be found in God and received through Jesus Christ? Here is everything you need to know about God’s perfect, unconditional agape love for us.
Quick Facts:
agape is a Greek word pronounced ah-gah-pay
agape love is a love of choice, not out of attraction or obligation
agape love is what Jesus Christ displayed on the cross for us as he took our place for the sin

I’ve studied the Greek terms for love, especially the word agapē which is supposed to be the highest expression of love – a pure, selfless, unconditional thing. Agape love is love at the highest level. It’s so much more than we could ever dream or imagine. When we fully understand and grasp what agape love means for us, it will transform how we view ourselves and ultimately, how we view ourselves.

The love of one human being for another is one thing. To love someone who is like you makes sense. To love someone who shares your nature and experiences is not surprising. Even to say that God, who is unlike me, still loves me, although shocking is still within my capacity to grasp and appreciate. But what I can’t understand, what threatens to push me over the edge into the valley of incredulity and disbelief, is that God loves me in the same way and to the same degree that he loves his Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.

With God there is no beginning and there is no end. There has never been a time when he didn’t exist. Thus there has never been a time when he didn’t love his Son. He never “began” to love his Son and he will never “cease” to love his Son. He has loved his Son from all eternity, and always will. How are we supposed to comprehend that sort of love, an eternal, never-beginning-and-never-ending kind of love?

We struggle even more with the idea of infinity. To say that something is infinite is to say it has no limitations, no boundaries, and that it is impossible to measure or compute or quantify. The Father’s love for his Son is infinitely passionate and infinitely intense. It doesn’t rise or fall, it doesn’t increase or decrease. It is now and has always been and always will be infinite and measureless and unfathomable.

The love that God the Father has for God the Son in the intimacy and eternality and infinity of the Godhead is here said to be the same love that he has for you and me. If that doesn’t blow your mental and emotional circuits, nothing will.

“By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world”
(1 John 4:17).

I believe that John is saying that the Father’s love for his children reaches its intended goal (is “perfected”) when it produces in us a feeling of security so powerful that we lose all fear of judgment. When our sense of being loved by God becomes so internally intense and undeniable that we can only smile at the prospect of judgment day, his passion has fulfilled its purpose!

Someone might think it presumptuous to have lost all fear of judgment. But John clearly says that our confidence is based on the fact that the believer is “as he [Jesus] is”. What could that possibly mean? In what sense is the Christian “as Jesus is” in the world? John may mean that we are righteous, as Jesus is righteous. By faith in him we are justified, declared righteous in the sight of God and therefore we look forward to judgment day confident that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (cf. Romans 8:1). That’s possible, but I think the answer lies elsewhere.

John is saying that our confidence is linked with God’s love for us and that in some sense we are as Jesus is. It seems reasonable to me that John is here saying what he heard Jesus pray in John 17:23. When John says that our confidence is based on the fact that we are as Jesus is, he is declaring that we are loved by the Father as Jesus is loved by the Father! No wonder all fear is cast out (v. 18). There is no need to fear him whom you know feels only that kind and depth of love for you.

CONCLUSION

Now, let me put together these two truths. How is God’s love for us most perfectly and greatly expressed? In other words, of all the things that God might do for us to show his love, what is the highest and greatest expression? I think the answer is stated clearly in v. 24. There is no greater manifestation of God’s love for hell-deserving men and women than to do whatever is necessary to make it possible for them to “see” his glory. If you think there is something greater and more blessed than that, then I suggest you have a very low and inadequate view of who God is and what seeing his “glory” entails

This is why the Apostle Paul prays as he does in Ephesians 3:14-21. There he speaks of the love of God for us in Christ as being something “that surpasses knowledge” (v. 19). It is a love, “the breadth and length and height and depth” (v. 18) of which we can’t begin to fathom. So Paul prays that the Holy Spirit would “strengthen” you and me “with power” so that we might have the capacity to “comprehend” the reality and life-changing power of this love.

SHALOM

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