I John 4:7-11 NKJV
From the Beginning
I find a little difficult to write about God’s love because we really don’t have anything that compares to it.
The closest comparison I have is loving my children from the moment they were born. I think I loved the idea of them when I carried them, but I’ve found nothing in my life compares to holding them and realizing ‘this is my child’.
Loving God and accepting God’s love is a different matter.
We cannot see God standing in front of us. We believe by faith that God is real.
I’ve written about going to Arrowhead Stadium in the 1960’s to see Billy Graham. As long as I live I’ll not forget what happened that night when I walked into the stadium filled with people.
A whirlwind swept through me that felt like a hurricane. I cried the entire time I was there. During the altar call, I went forward and someone spoke with me. I was crying and trying to tell him something had happened to me. He smiled and told me the Spirit of God swept through me.
I don’t know that I attributed it to God’s love, but I knew my life would never be the same again. I knew without doubt that God was real.
Shortly after that night I started having dreams and visions that came true some time after. God was telling me what was to come.
I’ve been asked if all my dreams come true. No, not all dreams have come true. But, when God is speaking to me, I know the dream is from God. I don’t know how I know. I just know.
I came to a place when I read other dreams and visions in scripture. Many prophets had dreams in scripture and Joseph had dreams that guided him when Jesus was born (Matthew 2:13 and 19) instructing him what to do to protect the child.
My dreams and visions remind me that God loves me so much that He speaks to me. Other people I’ve known have gifts from the Spirit that are different from mine, but they guide them. My Mom has the gift of hospitality and helps. God shows her who needs His love and she has always jumped right in to love them. She becomes the feet and hands of Jesus spreading God’s love around.
In I John 4:7-8 we are told, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
My Mom loves people, and God has always used her to spread love around. I have always been amazed by how much she loves others.
John tells us in I John 4:9, “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.”
Jesus was sent into the world because of God’s love. When I think about it, I think it would have been really really hard to leave heaven (where he had always been) and come to earth. Then when He came, Jesus wasn’t received very well, especially by the Roman authorities and others in power. I am also reminded that because Jesus is God, he would have known how it would end.
When we think of the big picture like that, we BEGIN to see how much God really really loves us. John writes in I John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
We didn’t know to to love. So God came in the flesh to show us and teach us how to love.
Realistically we are not capable of the kind of love and the magnitude of love God has for us. I’ve learned that even though I can’t fully understand God’s love, by getting quiet and spending time sitting with God I can feel His love and I can love God back.
God loves us. Through the Spirit, we can feel God’s love.
We also experience God’s love when God sends other people to love us and help us. I had a conversation last week with a woman who is a believer. She said one day her car had a flat tire on a busy highway. The incident predated cellular phones and she didn’t know how to change a tire. She prayed and a truck driver spotted her, pulled over, changed the tire for her, and told her God told him to stop. God sent the trucker to her.
I John 4:11 says, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
The truck driver listened.
He knew God.
He obeyed the nudge of God.
He was the hands and feet of Jesus that day.
The absolute best way to teach someone about God’s love is to LOVE them!
When she told me the story I asked her if she was afraid that day. She laughed and said normally she would have been but she just knew God sent the truck driver to help her.
That’s the way God operates. He loves us and He sends just what we need when we need it.
That’s how God’s love works.
Today’s Spiritual Practice is: Love
Ask God to show you His love, then wait and watch for it. Nothing is too big or too little for God.
In God, Deborah
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