Saturday 22 September 2018

Lesson 7

Lesson 7: "God loves me"

So, this is the last lesson – and ground-breaking stuff it is too… 😉

You’d have thought that being a Christian for 30+ years I’d have worked this one out a bit earlier. But I guess there’s a difference between knowing something in your head and knowing it in your heart

Sometimes it’s easy to slip into a misconception of what the Gospel is. In the past I think I’ve subconsciously believed that Jesus exploited some mystical spiritual loophole that bypassed our sin and let us sneak into heaven under God’s nose – but we’d better toe the line or watch out! But in the last few years I’ve grown to understand that the Gospel isn’t that – the Gospel is extravagant love in action.

I think I’ve spent enough years worrying about whether I’m good enough, or whether I’ve done something that’s going to ‘blow my chances’ of getting into Heaven.

Some time ago I was in the car with my daughter and she was expressing similar fears. It suddenly hit me that God just isn’t like that – He loved and sent Jesus to die for us ‘while we were yet sinners’. It wasn’t Jesus’ death that made Him able or willing to love us, or even look at us. Our Father is not looking for any excuse to keep us out of Heaven. He is looking for any ‘shadow of turning’ – any excuse to get us into Heaven, to be with Him forever. He wants us there!

In one of his books, Adrian Plass noted that often the words ‘God is good and He loves me’ can become stale and meaningless through familiarity. Surprisingly, the realisation of who and how God is can become more powerful when we realise ‘God is nice, and He likes me’.

If we truly understood how our Father in heaven feels about us, why on earth would we worry about anything?


Here endeth the lessons…



2 comments:

  1. valuable lesson :) hope all is going well in subsequent fall out from tsunami..

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  2. Are you visiting s.oxhey when you come over? Would be great to see you! Or near to Reading?

    ReplyDelete