The Daily Word

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Yesterday we started to consider love and in particular, God’s love. We said that love always has an object, it doesn’t just exist as an abstract emotion and, as far as God’s love is concerned, ‘He so loves the world’, which is the whole of humanity, and specifically you and me. 

But the other characteristic about love is that it MUST express itself. None of us who have ever loved have always found ourselves wanting to give, in any way, to the other and God’s love for us is the best example of that characteristic that could ever be found.

So John 3 v 16 continues with words that we can never fully appreciate even as Christians, “…. That He gave His only begotten Son….”. What a statement! What an action! What a gift! Had God’s Son only taken on human form, which He did when He walked on earth as Jesus, that in itself would have been a gift beyond anything that had ever been given. The miracles of healing that He performed showed the love He had for people, and they could say ‘we never saw anything like this before’. But God the Father giving God the Son went far beyond incarnation, because that same God/man went to the cross and died to pay the price for our sin. That was the real gift that not only had temporal results, but had eternal results, which we will consider later this week. John, probably the closest of all Jesus’ Disciples said this, “Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” .

That is why at the beginning of v 16, John writes “God so loved the world” because it was the only way he had of expressing the demonstration of such love! We sing “Such love …..” and had we a deeper understanding of God’s love, we would constantly abound in thankfulness to Him but also in our practical love towards others.

Article written by Brian Preston, Elder @SFGH 

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