God's Eccentricity

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

Now, what is our great encouragement of all that we know about ourselves? It is the fact that God loves us without measure, and He is so keenly interested in our spiritual growth and progress that He stands by in faithfulness to teach and instruct and discipline us as His dear children!

I once wrote something about how God loves us and how dear we are to Him. I wasn't sure I should put it down on paper, but God knew what I meant. I said, "The only eccentricity that I can discover in the heart of God is that a God such as He is should love sinners such as we are!" God has that strange eccentricity but it still does not answer our wondering question, "Why did God love us?"

You can put all of your confidence in God. He is not angry with you, His dear child! He is not waiting to pounce on you in judgment. He knows that we are dust and He is loving and patient toward us.

If it were true that the Lord would put the Christian on the shelf every time he failed and blundered and did something wrong, I would have been a piece of statuary by this time! I know God and He isn't that kind of God!

Thank You, Father, that in Your eccentricity You loved me enough to lay down Your life for me, to forgive my failures and call me Your child. Amen

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Comprehending the Incomprehensible

"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love." (1 John 4:8)

The love of God is the hardest of all His attributes to speak about. You may not understand God's love for us. I don't know that I do myself. We are trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. It is like trying to take the ocean in your arms, or embrace the atmosphere, or rise to the stars. No one can do it, so I suppose I must do the best I can and trust the Holy Spirit to make up for human lack.

When it says, "God is love," it means that love is an essential attribute of God's being. It means that in God is the summation of all love, so that all love comes from God. And it means that God's love, we might say, conditions all of His other attributes, so that God can do nothing except He it in love.

What we mean when we say, "God is love," is what we mean when we say of man, "He is kindness itself." We don't mean that kindness and the man are equated and identical, but we mean the man is so kind that kindness is all over him and conditions everything he does. So when we say, "God is love," we mean that God's love is such that it permeates His essential being and conditions all that He does. Nothing God ever does, or ever did, or ever will do, is done separate from the love of God.

Loving, Father, I can't comprehend Your love, but I revel in it. I fall to my knees in worship. Amen

~A. W. Tozer~