God’s Extravagant Love

Have you ever felt alone? Have you ever felt like no one is listening to you? If so, than my hope is that the next two or three minutes bless you, and help you gain confidence. My friends and I recently finished a devotional series titled, “How God’s Love Will Change Us”. This Bible plan got me thinking, what is love? Like, what is the point of it? According to the dictionary, its definition reads, “a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.” I love that it used the word, “passionate”. To have a passion means that you have a powerful emotion for something (or someone). So, what about love, why am I writing about this? Well, the Bible contains the word love around 310 times (give or take). John states, in 1 John 4:7, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” When did love start? Love never started. God is love. Love started when God started, therefore there is no start, it has existed for all eternity. So many times, throughout the Bible, we see the Lord telling us to love. As it says in 1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us.” God is reminding us that we need to be more like Him, and what better way to relate to God, than arguably His greatest aspect. The way I see it, love is His the best part of Him, if I were to pick one. Every possible word/words that we could use to describe Him is a reflection of His love. Likewise, every decision we make is a reflection of our love. Whether that love is for God, or if it is for others. The only kind of love that is detrimental to us is the love of self. This would include selfishness, pride, etc. Every decision we make is a result of love. For example, going to church with the right attitude, knowing that you can only benefit from it, is the love of God, wanting to worship Him. When you help your neighbor rake leaves, or shovel snow, you are showing love towards them, the love of others. Lastly, and certainly the least of the three, the love of self. Staying home from church so that you can finish homework that you procrastinated for a week, is the love of yourself. My friends and I started a new devotional series titled, “First Things First”. The goal of the devotional is to encourage us to keep our priorities straight. If Jesus is the focal point of our lives, the one that we desire to spend eternity worshiping, then why would we even think twice about making a selfish decision? Well, it is a part of our sin nature. We were born with this desire to please ourselves. God’s love for us is unending. He bottles our tears! No, that’s not the way it should work. We should be collecting His tears. He is our father, He died for us and defeated death. He provides for us. He runs to where we are and welcomes us with open arms. His love for us is so great. We should be doing all of this for Him. No, for He did not come to be served, but to serve. He serves us, therefore we should be serving Him with the entirety of our lives, for He gave us the lives we have in the first place. We have found life in Him. Not the world and the pleasures that come along with it. The verdict is— if God could send His son, to be killed as a sacrifice, by us, for what we have done, then we should be willing to lay our lives down for Him.

-Jack Hilsher