There are a million reasons why I love God
but for the sake of blogging, I’m going to try to keep this simple. I can’t
promise this will be short but I will do my best. I love God because He is so
much more than we hear about. And He is so much more than just the author of life. God is a real character in my story. When
you read a romance novel, do you find yourself falling in love with the author?
I didn’t think so. If you’re like me, you fall in love with the characters. And
because God is real and an active character in my story, I love Him.
It’s been said and written that the best
things in life are meant to be shared. When good things happen in our lives, we
naturally want to share them with the people we love and care about. The Bible
tells us that God is love and because He is love, He naturally desires to love
us and He wants us to love Him back, authentically. God has lots of goodies that he would like to share with us through His favor on us and He wants to bless us with godly wisdom but that can only be imparted to us through a personal relationship with Him. It’s so difficult to explain God and how He loves us because His love is lavish, unconditional and overwhelming in the most amazing and extraordinary way.
I’ve learned that love can never be forced.
You could never force or make a person love you. And although God has the power
to make us love Him back, He allows us to choose. I love that about Him. I love
that He didn’t create us to be robots programmed to do what He wants us to do. It
is His love and His kindness and His mercy and His grace that transforms the
human heart.
To prove to you that love can not be
forced, I will leave you with this example: If you were held as a prisoner in a
foreign country, a guard could easily use his “almost” unlimited power to make
you do things you thought you would never do. With applied force, a guard could
make you renounce your God, curse your family, work without pay, eat human
excrement, etc. But what the guard can
not make you do with applied force is love him.
God’s word says that we love because He
loved us first. Our love is a response to Gods love for us. And because of
that, we have the capacity and the ability to love God and love others. When you
have a real God encounter and God reveals to you His lavish love for you, it’s more
than just remarkable and super-natural. It’s transformative. When God reveals
Himself to you, you will never be the same.
If God has not revealed Himself to you yet, it
is never God’s fault. The problem is never God. The problem is that our hearts are
hard and closed off and we’re too proud or stubborn or afraid to allow God in. I
know this because I avoided God for 31 years before I Iet Him in. I avoided Him
out of fear. And I see this all the time in people. Many people believe they
have to clean up their act before they can get serious with God. And they
believe the fallacy that they need to clean up their act or be perfect to go to
church or to enter into a relationship with Him but it’s just the opposite. God
invites us to come as we are, because it's His job to do the clean up. He can
only change you and clean you up, if you are willing. You must be open to it. The
Christian life is a process of learning, and growing and changing. Nobody is
perfect and nobody gets it right all the time. Sometimes we fall, sometimes we
stumble, sometimes we fail miserably but God already knows this about us and He
loves us anyway. He is full of mercy and grace and he corrects us gently not to
condemn us or shame us but to give us rest from living lives that are not
congruent with how He designed us to live. He created us for love and to love, to be
peacemakers, to enter into His rest through a relationship with Him and to share God’s love with others.
The difference between man and God I’ve
learned is this: Man will fail you. God will not. Man will pursue you until he has you and God never stops pursuing
you. God pursues because He longs for us to share our hearts and lives with him
daily, He wants to love us and bless us through a relationship with Him. He's going to love you either way but through a relationship with Him, you will feel His love and experience His presence in your life. Through a relationship with Him, He teaches us, shapes us,
molds us, makes us better and wiser. Yes indeed, what He desires is a
relationship with us but He will never force Himself on you. He allows you to
choose. And He wants us to cultivate that relationship with Him by choosing to
spend time with Him through prayer, reading the Bible, sitting in solitude being
still before Him so we can hear Him, and through regular church attendance to
hear the Word of God and to worship Him. When we do these things, our
relationship with Him grows and we go deeper.
Let me ask you this: Can you recall a time
when a significant person in your life sat you down with the sole purpose of wanting to know your
heart more deeply, fully expecting to enjoy what would be found there? I can’t
but did you know that that’s what God wants? He wants us to open our hearts to
Him, daily. This happens through a relationship. He wants us to talk to Him
through prayer about our desires, our hopes our dreams, our struggles, our needs and what
hurts us deep inside.
I love God because He is always pursuing
us. Some of us see it and ignore it and some of us see it and respond to it. I
love Him because He calls us friend
and beloved and because we are the apple of His eye. God has revealed His
passionate and tender love for humanity and that was demonstrated in a very
powerful way at Calvary , at the cross when He
sent His only begotten Son, Jesus to take our place. 2000 years ago, Jesus died on a cross for
our sins friends. And three days later, He was resurrected and joined His
Father in heaven and when we believe that He took our place and paid our sin
debt, and accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, we are saved and born again spiritually. It’s
radical, I know. It blew my mind too when I first learned about it but I
continued to pray to God about this and begged Him to help me understand this truth.
And He did! And I have experienced the hand of God in my life more times than I can remember.
Beloved, God sets His affection on us. And His desire is to free us from bondage, to bless us, to prosper us, and to dwell in
our hearts but sadly many reject Him. I rejected Him for many years, for three
decades to be exact and compartmentalized Him for many years only calling on
Him when I was in trouble, when I needed Him, or when I felt sad. I can’t
imagine the anguish in His heart because I rejected Him over and over and over or
how His heart churned. And what I love about God is that He never gave up on
me. He never stopped loving me. He never stopped pursuing me because He’s not a
quitter. And God will never give up on you
either.
Can I ask
you a few questions?
Have you
ever felt sympathy for a friend who lost their spouse?
Have you
ever sat in silence as a friend cried out in grief to you because someone broke
their heart?
Did you hear
the churning of their heart, the deep distress?
God cries
too in distress when we reject Him. We break His heart every time we reject
Him. And yet, God does not give
up! And it’s because He’s committed to love. God is the very essence of love and
love never fails my friend. He is relentless in His pursuit.
God sent us
His son, Jesus to rescue mankind. And through Jesus, He defeated Satan and destroyed
the power that sin wields over the human heart. God invites us into a beautiful
relationship with Him through His Son and is willing to forgive and begin a new
thing in your life. And that’s why I love God.
No matter
how bad you’ve blown it, nothing is too hard for God. Nothing. There is nothing
you’ve done that God can not and will not forgive.
Nothing is
impossible for God or with God because He is a great healer, the God of second chances and new
beginnings and fresh starts and I just love that about Him!
Until next time,
xx, Ruthie
If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe
and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and
are saved. ~Romans 10:9-10
