Good News - God Loves You!

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.  Psalm 23:6a, The Message

It is one thing to be loved, but quite another to be pursued.  God’s love pursues His creation.  He doesn’t just sit and wait.  He chases us. He doesn’t just say I am here if they want me.  God wants us to know Him and come to Him, not fear death or respond to Him in fear.  When a child responds to their father in fear, love is driven away.

Unmerited Love
You don’t have to do anything or be anything for God to love you.  Despite our flaws and imperfections, He sees us as special and worthy of His love.  God’s love extends to all men regardless of any belief, race, creed, action or thought.  God’s love was first poured out on His Son and celebrated by The Holy Spirit in the dance of eternity.

Unconditional Love- It is extended to us when we do not deserve it and continues even when we do not respond to it. There is not one good thing in any of us that merits God’s love.   We try to get ourselves straightened out before we come to God, but He wants us to come just as we are and let Him straighten us out. 

Uninfluenced Love- It is His love for us that gives us our worth.  God’s Love is uninfluenced. This means there was nothing in the objects of His love to call it into exercise, nothing in the creature to attract or prompt it. What was there in me to attract the heart of God? Absolutely nothing. But, to the contrary, everything to repel Him, everything calculated to make Him loathe me—sinful, depraved, a mass of corruption, with “no good thing” in me.  God did not love us because we loved Him, but He loved us before we had a particle of love for Him. We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19

Unending Love- The hard things that happen to us in life are not punishment from God, no matter how it feels. Sometimes it can feel as if He has abandoned us or doesn’t love us but God never punishes His children. He seeks to turn us from sin which destroys our lives.  He laid all the punishment for our sins on His Son – the greatest gift of love ever shown.  Not only did we not earn it, but we don’t deserve it.  He has never left us and He never will.  He sealed His love and our relationship with Him for eternity when Jesus died on the cross.  

Scripture to Claim:This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  1 John 4:9-10