I remember my former pastor Jim Gardiner always saying that it is easier to get people to love God than to get people to allow God to love them. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “Indeed, our chief defect as Christians is that we fail to realize Christ’s love to us.”*
I often write about the love of God shown in Christ’s sacrifice for us. I think I often write about it because I am often thinking about it! It always shakes me to my core to think about God loving me, a sinner. That verse in Romans 5 says it all to me. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” [vs 8 NIV]
This past Saturday we celebrated Veterans Day. It has been proven far too often that members of the Armed Forces will lay down their lives for their comrades in battle. But I wonder how many would lay down their life for their enemy? That is not what you do for your enemy. Yet, that is what God did for His.
In sin I lived until the call of the Gospel reached me. I was God’s enemy. I neither acknowledged Him as Lord of my life not had any desire whatsoever to serve Him and then His love flooded my heart, His grace took hold of me and faith arose. For the first time in life perhaps, I understood what “love” was. God loved me. He proved it to me in His offer of Christ’s sacrifice for my sin.
Oh, beloved of God, let us never as Lloyd-Jones wrote, “fail to realize Christ’s love to us.” Let us not doubt how much He was willing to give so that His enemies might become His children. Let us never fail to proclaim His love in this life so that others might come to know Him.
*Martyn Lloyd-Jones (The Unsearchable Riches of Christ [Baker], p. 219)
