The Generous Love of God

Generous Love of God

Recently I was reading about Spiritual Blessings in Ephesians 1:3-8. Suddenly a typically sedate reading time became vibrant with joyous meaning and life!

This passage starts out by telling us that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. Not just a select few, here and there – but a lot. Surely when God says “every”, he isn’t referring to just a few that He has decided to award me with – but rather to an abundance, as in: pressed down-shaken together-running over. We get this same picture of generosity later in the passage when it says that God poured out his grace to us. Some synonyms for the word poured are stream, run, gush, cascade, flood, surge, or rain heavily, and pelt down in torrents. Get the picture? Every Blessing and Abundant Grace poured out on us in flood!

And that isn’t all. It also says that “He showered His kindness on us with all wisdom and understanding”. I almost can’t take it all in. I am totally soaked now with kindness and wisdom and understanding. And I am loving it! I am believing it! I want more of this! I am so tired of living like a pauper when I can be living in the richness of God.

Splashing
Fun
Joyful

God didn’t just do this because He had to or because I am/we are especially deserving. In this passage of scripture we are told that He loved us before He made the world (before I was born), and that He decided “in advance” to adopt us as children through Jesus. He didn’t have to do it, “this is what He wanted to do” – it even “gave him great pleasure.” These aren’t my words, it says so right there in this passage of scripture. Wow! Think about it. God is opening up His heart to you and me here, trying to get us to understand how much He loves us!

This is the most amazing love, because the cost was great – and He paid it. Because you and I failed to. Because the power of His love can’t be overcome or understated. So, “rich in kindness and grace,he purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave us our sins” (our pride and selfishness, our fear and doubt and rejection of God; to name a few sins that we are all guilty of).

“God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.” They say that love is blind. It must be – because no matter how hard I try, I know how far from holy and without fault I am.

So my response to this generous and undeserved love, is to abandon myself to it and to love Jesus back with all that I am. I want to grow more intimately in love with this Lover of My Soul.

As my parents age I find myself feeling love for them more deeply (maybe in anticipation of the eventual loss of them on this earth). All the old hurts and failures are fading away and I often pray for them with great depths of feeling. I pray for my children with that same deep aching love, wanting only the very best for them, and also readily forgiving them when they don’t always chose the best or when they disappoint me. I can’t help it! Love is at a deeper level than behavior or thought. God speaks to me at these times to tell me that this is how He feels about me. And I get the picture. I get it! God is Love!

God’s amazing, overcoming, abundant, generous love for me was expressed in Christ, on the cross. Because none of us could, or ever can, find our own way to Him, He found a way to us – to me. And the meeting place is Jesus Christ. It is as simple as that.

How do I throw myself into this kind of love? With abandon? Or with cautious restraint?
How easy is it to believe that this really is how God feels about me? Why do I have trouble wholeheartedly loving God back?