For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared... (Titus 3:3, 4, NKJV).
Overwhelmed by Kindness
There are times, wondrous miraculous times, when God's love for me breaks into my awareness like a surging tide and I am swept along in wordless adoration and worship. This is not something I can do or conjure up, it is His priceless gift, and I believe, truly believe, that this is His heart towards me always, not because of anything I am, but because of who He is.
I also believe that through my focus on the world, or things, or my life circumstances, I can cut off this awareness, I can lose sight of the lavish outpouring of His marvelous kindness. And then when the veil of my own making reopens, and I realize once more what I have been missing through my own self-centeredness and misdirected focus, I weep like a lost child finally found and once more safe in the arms of His Father.
The knowledge of God's love changes everything. His undeserved kindness toward me is so surprising and so unbelievably comforting that it makes all other knowledge and experience a mere whisper in comparison. Nothing else matters.
David, the ancient Warrior King of Israel, wrote of this often in his sweet Psalms of worship and adoration to God. John, one of the Sons of Thunder, wrote of it as well and became known to the early church as the Apostle of Love.
Satan wants the world to focus only upon God's judgment, while simultaneously denying that it applies. But the God of the Bible desires that the world know foremost of His love.
I have read the popular atheist writers of modernity. Dawkins, Hitchens and others, and the overriding sense I get is that these are angry men; angry at a God they claim does not exist; angry at a world that does not quite meet their specifications. Underneath the anger, I cannot help but see unrequited love. Their universe abandons them continually, and they are left alone to make sense of something so vast and complicated that in a terrified show of masculine intellectual bravado, they desire to believe with absolute delusional certainty that all they see of their tiny little corner of existence is all there is; like a little boy trapped in the darkness gritting his teeth and trying to rationalize a bravery he cannot possibly feel.
I have known life in this world without knowing God's love. It is empty and hateful and filled with barely disguised malice and envy. It has no meaning, and is insanely purposeless. But God's love poured out in our hearts makes sense of all that, and obliterates the darkness. He desires to shine that light of His love outward and everywhere, and asks only that we, His children, open our eyes.
When you doubt that He loves you, look at the Cross.
Overwhelmed by Kindness
There are times, wondrous miraculous times, when God's love for me breaks into my awareness like a surging tide and I am swept along in wordless adoration and worship. This is not something I can do or conjure up, it is His priceless gift, and I believe, truly believe, that this is His heart towards me always, not because of anything I am, but because of who He is.
I also believe that through my focus on the world, or things, or my life circumstances, I can cut off this awareness, I can lose sight of the lavish outpouring of His marvelous kindness. And then when the veil of my own making reopens, and I realize once more what I have been missing through my own self-centeredness and misdirected focus, I weep like a lost child finally found and once more safe in the arms of His Father.
The knowledge of God's love changes everything. His undeserved kindness toward me is so surprising and so unbelievably comforting that it makes all other knowledge and experience a mere whisper in comparison. Nothing else matters.
David, the ancient Warrior King of Israel, wrote of this often in his sweet Psalms of worship and adoration to God. John, one of the Sons of Thunder, wrote of it as well and became known to the early church as the Apostle of Love.
Satan wants the world to focus only upon God's judgment, while simultaneously denying that it applies. But the God of the Bible desires that the world know foremost of His love.
I have read the popular atheist writers of modernity. Dawkins, Hitchens and others, and the overriding sense I get is that these are angry men; angry at a God they claim does not exist; angry at a world that does not quite meet their specifications. Underneath the anger, I cannot help but see unrequited love. Their universe abandons them continually, and they are left alone to make sense of something so vast and complicated that in a terrified show of masculine intellectual bravado, they desire to believe with absolute delusional certainty that all they see of their tiny little corner of existence is all there is; like a little boy trapped in the darkness gritting his teeth and trying to rationalize a bravery he cannot possibly feel.
I have known life in this world without knowing God's love. It is empty and hateful and filled with barely disguised malice and envy. It has no meaning, and is insanely purposeless. But God's love poured out in our hearts makes sense of all that, and obliterates the darkness. He desires to shine that light of His love outward and everywhere, and asks only that we, His children, open our eyes.
When you doubt that He loves you, look at the Cross.
