His Heart, My Home

In last week’s post, we learned to look at our love-relationship with the Father directly and correctly, through the lens of His heart.

His love for us, and His wonderful purpose for our lives, preceded and predated our love for Him. Amazingly, His love for us actually existed even before creation itself!

“Long before He laid down earth’s foundations, He had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of His love, to be made whole and holy by His love.” (Ephesians 1:4, The Message)

Our love for God is simply our response to His unearned, unmerited, unparalleled, unprecedented, unmatched, unequaled, unconditional, unchangeable, unending, unfailing love for us!

We love, because He “first-loved” us.
(1 John 4:19 Amplified Bible)

God’s love can only be recognized, understood, and experienced through a personal relationship with Christ. It’s only then that we begin to love ourselves and to love others, because we can only give what we have already received.

The forever-kind of love,  can’t even exist outside of God. He is the source and essence of love. All love originates in, is expressed through, and flows out from Him. (1 John 4:8)

The Bible says it this way:

“… we can now experience the endless love of God cascading into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who lives in us!”
(Romans 5:5, The Passion Translation)

Our Heavenly Father loves us absolutely… completely… steadfastly… totally… and endlessly. But we, like the Apostle Paul, can only become “utterly convinced” of His love by looking at Jesus.

Thus the greatest revelation in the Bible is:
“For God so [greatly] loved and dearly prized the world, that He [even] gave His [One and] only begotten Son, so that whoever believes and trusts in Him [as Savior] shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16, Amplified Bible)

The Father’s love can only be measured by what He gave to secure our eternal salvation! He gave Heaven’s Best, Heaven’s All, His One and Only Son, His Own Heart!

We are invited to consider the limitless riches of God’s love as we consider the vastness of His creation:

“Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together.” (Psalm 34:3)

Our God is awesomely amazing! The very heavens declare His glory!

CONSIDER THIS:

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. A “light-year” is the distance light travels in one year. Here’s how far that is: if you drove your car at 55 miles per hour, it would take you 12.2 million years to reach the nearest star, which is only 4.3 light-years away!

The entire distance across the known universe is 40 billion light-years, and our vast universe contains over 100 billion trillion stars! That’s a number with 26 zeroes!

WOW! Big universe! Why so big, you say? From God’s perspective it’s not big enough!
That’s why the universe is still expanding!

As mind-blowingly big as God’s creation is, it is still finite. The universe can be measured. There are limits. It has boundaries.

But, the universe, with all its space and time, is not big enough to contain His love for us! His love for us can’t be measured! His love for us knows no limits and no boundaries! His love for us is infinite, because He is infinite, and He is love!

Big universe? Bigger God! And He is our very own “Abba-Papa”!

Let’s go further. We all know the right way to use a telescope, don’t we? If we look through the eyepiece, the lens magnifies the object that we are seeking, bringing it “closer” to us, so we can see it more clearly.

Using the telescope of God’s Word correctly will enable us to see the “big picture”…a God who is immensely large and infinitely powerful, who designed, created, and now maintains and coordinates the entirety of time, space, and eternity. And we will also “see” that the same awesomely creative and powerful God loves each of us, unconditionally, and eternally!

But what if we use the telescope incorrectly? Looking through the wrong end of the instrument can make something large appear to be small, and something small (like a tiny insect on the lens) appear to be gigantic. It can and does distort our perception of reality. We can become disoriented and confused. Everything is out of focus, and “out-of-whack.”

When that happens, the great and all-powerful God of the universe will be perceived as small, shrunken, and diminished, and our struggles, doubts, faults, and failures will be seen as looming “larger than life”.

And if we continue to look through the wrong end of the telescope, focusing on the “smallness of self”, rather than on the “bigness of God”, we will soon begin to believe that our lives are hopelessly broken, and our difficulties and challenges too big, too complex, maybe even impossible for God to fix.

But ask yourself: Is the Creator and Master of the Universe, your very own Abba-Father, unwilling to forgive you, and to forget your failures? Is He really unable to “fix” you, and free you from your faults?

I’m going to make a statement now that some of you may not completely agree with. But I want to help you know God’s love in a deeper way, so here goes:

The Body of Christ spends way too much time focusing on sin. We’re looking through the wrong end of the telesope! Sin should never be the main focal point in the life of a child of God! God’s love should be!

To back up my assertion, I am inviting you to prayerfully consider the truth in these verses:

● Psalm 103:12-13, The Voice Translation
¹² “You see, God takes all our crimes—our seemingly inexhaustible sins—and removes them. As far as east is from the west, He removes them from us. ¹³ An earthly father expresses love for His children; it is no different with our heavenly Father; the Eternal shows His love for those who revere Him.”

● Romans 8:1, The Passion Translation
“So now the case is closed. There remains no accusing voice of condemnation against those who are joined in life-union with Jesus, the Anointed One.”

● Isaiah 43:25, The Passion Translation
“I, yes I, am the One and Only, who completely erases your sins, never to be seen again.”

● Proverbs 10:12, The Passion Translation
“… love draws a veil over every insult and finds a way to make sin disappear.”

● Hebrews 8:12, The Voice Translation
” I will be merciful when they fail, and I will erase their sins and wicked acts out of my memory as though they had never existed.”

Now let’s recap from those scriptures:

God’s love separates us completely from our sin. But nothing can ever separate us from the love of God!

God’s love has the power to silence the nagging, accusing voice of sin in our lives!

God’s love erases our sin so thoroughly that it is never seen again! God’s love actually makes our sin disappear!

God’s love not only forgives our sins, but forgets them as well! Because of His love, sin is “out of God’s sight… and out of God’s mind”!

Sin’s power is broken. It is a non-factor in terms of affecting God’s unconditional love for us. It cannot undo the eternal salvation God has provided for us.

Sin is no match for the greatness of God’s love, mercy, and grace!

If there’s sin in your life, repent! It doesn’t have to be a long agonizing process. Just do what 1 John 1:9 says: “Confess it!”

TURN your back on sin! Forsake it, and RUN, don’t walk, away from it, right back into your Father’s loving arms! That’s where you belong! Forever!

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Blessings!