God loves us
Does God love me and how? This is a question that has been asked by countless people, countless times. The answer the Bible gives to this question is that God not just loves us but He loves us more than anybody else could ever love us. Let’s see this from the Word of God.
1. God loves us - He gave His Son for us.
To see God’s love for us, let’s start from 1 John 4:9. There we read:
"This is how God showed his love among us..."
Love, when it is honest, is always manifested in actions. Here the Word of God tells us that indeed God loves us and that His love was shown, was manifested. How? The answer is in the remaining of the verse:
1 John 4:9
"This is how God showed his love among us:
He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him."
God showed His love to us by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world that we might live through him. Along the same lines, John 3:16 tells us:
"For God so loved the world that he gave........"
As we said above love always takes actions, giving, and God, because He loved us, He gave! What did He give? Let’s carry on reading:
John 3:16-17
"For God so loved the world that
he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but the world through him might be saved."
God, for no other reason than love for us, He went so far as to give His Son to die for us, so that by believing in Him to have eternal life. Romans 5:6-10 demonstrate this point even more clearer:
Romans 5:6-10
"For, at just the right time, when we were still powerless,
Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him. For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having being reconciled, shall we be saved through his life."
See the phrase “God demonstrates His own love for us”. How does God demonstrate His love for us? He not only gave His Son for us, but He gave Him when we were still sinners, ungodly, completely unworthy of any such sacrifice! The same we also see in Ephesians 2:
Ephesians 2:1-3
"As for you, you were dead in trespasses and sins, in which
you used to walk when you followed the ways of this world, and of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient; among whom all of us also
lived at one time, in the cravings of our flesh, following the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and like the rest, we
were by nature objects of wrath."
I have marked in the above passage several words that are in past tense to give emphasis to the fact that for the man who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ and His resurrection the state described above is PAST. We were dead in trespasses and sins and objects of wrath. But we are no longer any of these! The state described in these verses is for us history, not reality! It is a state out of which we were delivered! But how were we delivered, by whom and why? Ephesians 2:4-9 give us the answer:
Ephesians 2:4-9
"BUT because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ
even when we were dead in transgressions - by grace you are saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us up with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you are saved through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no-one can boast."
The word “BUT” that opens this passage makes a contrast between what precedes it (verses 1-3) and what follows it (verses 4-9). Verses 1-3 gave us the pitiful state in which we were before we believed. As we read there, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” and “objects of wrath”. But God, “because of His great love for us”, changed all these: now instead of “dead in trespasses and sins” we are “alive with Christ” and instead of objects of wrath we are seated together with Christ in the heavenly places! From God’s perspective, it is already done! And why did God do this? "BECAUSE OF HIS GREAT LOVE FOR US......EVEN WHEN WE WERE DEAD IN TRANSGRESSIONS"!
2. God loves us - He made us His children.
Another passage that demonstrates how much God loves us is given in I John 3:1-2:
"How great is the love the Father has given to us that we should be called the children of God and that is what we are. The reason that the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved now we are the children of God..."
That we are children of God is also what Galatians 3:26 tells us: “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus”! And as the above passage makes it clear, this is a proof of how much God loves us. Really “how great is the love the Father has given to us”.
3. God loves us - He trains us.
We saw above that God, because of how much He loves us, He made us His children. And as a loving father trains and disciplines his children, so also and much better does God. As Hebrews 12:6 tells us:
Hebrews 12:6
"the Lord disciplines those He loves..."
Discipline may not be what we like but it is what we need! That’s why only those who really love us care enough to discipline us. And that’s why God disciplines us too: because He loves us and cares for us.
4. God loves us - Nothing can separate us from His love
Next and last stop in this short journey in God’s love is Romans 8:38-39:
Romans 8:38 – 39
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels [what kind of angels? fallen angels, angels of Satan], nor principalities, nor powers, nor present things, nor future things, nor height, not depth,
nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. "
God loves us and there is absolutely nothing, no power, no principality, nothing present or future that could separate us from His love. He loves us and He will never stop loving us. This is the truth of God’s Word.
5. God’s loves us – conclusion.
To conclude this article: we saw from the Word of God that God loves us and this is proved by the fact that He gave His Son for us, doing this even when we were sinners and ungodly! It would be a huge sacrifice to do this for people who were righteous and good. But we were not any such people. We were sinners, ungodly, dead in trespasses and sins. Nevertheless this did not stop God: He loved us and because of His love for us , He gave His Son for us while we were still sinners, so that by believing in Him can become alive in Christ and seated up with Him in the heavenly places.
Furthermore we saw that because God loves us, He made us His children. And as a caring Father disciplines his children who loves so also and much better does God.
Finally we also saw that God’s love for us is so GREAT and there is nothing that could separate us from it. To say it differently: there is nothing that could ever make God to stop loving us!