SOMETIMES...

God wants to be rigidly inflexible, unmovable, constantly constant to us, so that we are secure in our knowledge of who He is.  God is Love: all the other attributes of God’s nature spring out from and find their source in His love.  God loves, engages and is deeply personal to us as individuals... as the children of a loving Daddy, as well as being God Almighty, and He is faithful even when we are unfaithful for He cannot deny His love for us. God loves us too much to leave us the way we are... for this we will be eternally thankful. His goal is our perfection, our spiritual maturity... transformation into Christlikeness. God is relentless in the pursuit of our perfection, trimming away the callus of our earth-hardened hearts with laser like precision, what the Apostle Paul called spiritual circumcision. The circumstances of this life are His divine scalpel as He gently cuts away our old carnal, earth-bound nature releasing the implanted life of His Son from within. His love is our only anesthetic... so, sometimes His love hurts. God’s “Love” as well as His Goodness, Holiness, Righteousness, Justice... and all His other attributes, can be totally misunderstood if viewed by the reasoned logic of the world... by the natural mind. God defines His attributes by His own nature and His promises: Anything that moves us Godward... that sets our mind on things above... that releases more of His perfect nature within us... is Good, no matter the earthly cost or pain. We are shaped emotionally by the image of God we carry in our heart, so it is important to see things God’s way... to kneel down and kiss the hand that sometimes hurts...

LOVE HURTS...

GOD LOVES US 100%...

God holds nothing back in His love for us.  His “agape” love is passionate, self-sacrificing; fully committed and all consuming, a deep, constant, unchanging love for us.  Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines “passion” as a “powerful, compelling and extravagant emotion”.  This is why Christ’s willful sacrifice of Himself on the cross is called “The Passion of Christ”.  This is more than what mere mortals call love... this is way over the top supernatural love!  Another example of the passionate love of God is seen in the parable miss-titled the “Prodigal Son.” Webster’s defines “Prodigal” as “lavishly abundant, profuse, and wastefully extravagant”.  Now, who is the real prodigal in this story?  Not the boy although he is wasteful with his resources.  But the father is extravagantly “wasteful” with His love.  The father abundantly and profusely lavishes His love on the undeserving son.  The Father (God) is the prodigal... Our Daddy!  Passionate love is not simply God’s choice... passionate love is His nature... God is Love.  He loves us with a perfect love... an everlasting love... a relentless love... an unquenchable, insatiable, immeasurable, inexhaustible, irrepressible, irrational, unshakeable, inescapable, unmovable, constantly constant unchanging love.  There is nothing we can do to make Him love us more, and nothing we can do to make Him love us less.  God loves us 100%... all the way... all the time! He doesn’t love us for what we do - thank God - He loves us for who we are... His children.

ALL THE WAY... ALL THE TIME...