Loved to live

John’s gospel seems intent on showing us two things – the grandeur and majesty and wonder of Jesus AND how great His love is.

You are loved to LIVE.

It’s in chapter 3 that a surreptitious meeting with a leading Pharisee (did he and Paul know each other?) named Nicodemus reveals the motivation behind the Messiah’s arrival – love. “For God so loved the world, that He sent His only Son, that whomever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting LIFE.” (16)

Throughout the gospels, but especially in John, it is recorded that Jesus is passionately intent on introducing His disciples (and us) to the Father. Where Jewish faith had centered on “God” and believe deeply in a personal, merciful and powerful Yahweh, they did not dare (up to this point claim God as intimately close as “Father.” Jesus was out to change that. If you read through John with an ear for how He constantly referred to and corrected the disciples’ and Pharisees’ conceptions of His Father, you’ll be stunned. It was all He talked about, it seems. God is the ideal Father, and all of our earthly fathers are in varying degrees effective reflections of Him (some not at all).

The fatherhood of God leads to the forgiveness of the cross.

The cross proves that you are more loved than you know. A perfect Father loves perfectly. God can do nothing higher, more radical, and more final than to place your sins upon His Son and invite you into His presence fully forgiven. How perplexing! That our sins – the instrument of Jesus’ agony and spiritual torment are immediately forgiven upon the cross and we become welcomed into the Father’s presence through simple faith in Jesus?! It was full and final. Sins taken from us. Forgiveness offered. Salvation given. 

Too simple?

Some of us spend our Christian lives attempting to “pay God back” for the cross. We give and live and seek to serve and solve humanity and problems as if the world depended on our efforts instead of His. As if we can earn our forgiveness. Complete and total forgiveness and acceptance by God through simple faith in Jesus just seems too… simple? 

Be careful that you do not insult the cross by attempting to pursue obedience to “please God.” We obey because we love God. 

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14.15) 

And He loves us SO MUCH that He sent His Son. God will not make another cross for Jesus to climb back up on to forgive you again. What’s done is done. Forever. It’s why Jesus cried out from the cross, “It is finished!”

His intent was not just to “save” you but to give you LIFE. You are loved to LIVE!

So why are you not experiencing, walking in, and enjoying God’s love for you today?

“Because I live, you live too,” Jesus said in John 14.19.

Are you living? Do you experience daily the extravagant, sin-shattering, merciful, forgiving, patient, empowering and freeing love of the Father through Jesus?

You are more loved than you know.

[image error]I was in West Texas last week, surveying damage done to my father-in-law’s ranch from a raging brush fire. Aerial fire fighters dropped chemicals on the ranch house to save it, but other things were burned up. The black swath of destruction was disheartening. And yet, at the base of singed yucca plants, green shoots were appearing. We saw deer and rabbits bounding through the black, tree-stubbed land.

That seems to me to be similar to God’s love for us. We live in a world “burned up” by sin. Things are not as they should be. Brokenness, destruction and ruin are all around. And yet, we have been saved by the quenching love of the Father through the fire-proof nature of the cross. No fire can render the cross of Christ to ashes. Instead, His love for you daily gives us “a crown of beauty instead of ashes.” (Isaiah 61.3)

Christians are the isolated spots of green in an otherwise burned-out humanity. Rather than condemn, His love saves us to fully live and bring life!

In the introduction to The Indwelling Life of Christ by Major Ian Thomas, he says:

To be entirely honest, I know of nothing quite so boring as Christianity without Christ.

Countless people have stopped going to a place of worship simply because they are sick of going through the motions of a dead religion. They are tired of trying to start a car on an empty tank. What a pity that there are not more people around to show them that Jesus Christ is alive.

I know of nothing so utterly exciting as being a Christian, sharing the very Life of Jesus Christ on earth right here and now, being caught up with Him into the relentless, invincible purposes of the almighty God, and having available to us all the limitless resources of Deity for accomplishing those purposes.

Can you imagine anything more exciting than that?

When we grasp that Jesus offers us LIFE – vibrant, full, circumstance-defying, and water-walking life, we will being to enjoy our relationship with Him all the more and also to radically and fully bless others with joy, purpose, hope, reconciliation and peace.

You are loved to LIVE, Christian. Now show it by cultivating life and love all around you today.

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