Legacy Of Love

 Legacy Of Love

As I have loved you, so you must love one another. John 13:34

A man once described to me how his mother treated him as a child. She treated him like a vile animal, hateful, either unable or unwilling to show him any love whatsoever.

Most of us take our mother’s love for granted. We can hardly imagine our mother’s love not being part of our lives.

Imagine the world before Jesus. People laden with sins, reaching out to pagan gods with offerings that got them nowhere. Even the Jews who had the One True God to worship could not imagine a God who loved them unconditionally.

We live in a post-Christian world. Jesus came among us and showed His love by healing, feeding, teaching, helping, and even dying to bring God’s love and forgiveness to us. The background sound in our lives is a God whispering that He loves us and wants fellowship with us.

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. John 3:16

Anyone with an ounce of wisdom knows that we are sinful people. If God’s love is the background whisper calling to us, Sin is always in the foreground shouting in our ears and reverberating in our minds. We know what we ought to do, how we ought to behave, and yet our failures mount up as we struggle to live each day reaching out toward God’s goodness while stumbling over our sins. We needed a Deliverer to save us from ourselves.

Sin is in the world and part of our lives–that is a fact. How to be free from the sin all around us is the problem. Jesus came to deliver us from our sinful nature. He died upon a cross to set us free and give us the promise of an eternity that has no stain of sin upon it. Those who receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior are delivered from the penalties of sin. While in this life we will sin and still stumble from time to time, we are no longer surrounded by darkness. We have a light to guide us away from the pitfalls of sin and into a promise of eternal life with no sin whatsoever. And we have a Loving Father who we will spend eternity with.

"Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love." — Reinhold Niebuhr

Once we get a revelation of God’s love for us everything changes. When you realize the God who made everything, an all powerful Being, loves and cares for you–nothing else really matters. Not your sinful past, not your trials and struggles today, or worries for tomorrow, everything crystallizes into the fact of God’s love for us. Once you have a revelation of the fact that our temporary struggles with sin and pain will be swallowed up into an eternity of love and fellowship with our Maker everything else seems possible (2 Corinthians 4:17, Matthew 19:26).

A love that was made manifest on a cross exists as a force of love for good in the hearts of those who have committed their future to Jesus. His great love for those who believe is a music that fills our lives and makes the difficulties of this life bearable. More than that, realizing God loves us even when we are not very lovable enables us to also love other flailing human beings. We can love because we are loved. And it all began on the most unlikely thing called a Cross. Love is a verb. Love often involves sacrifice. God is love (1 John 4:8).

Prayer: Dear Lord, life is difficult with many hardships, and we struggle with sin throughout our lives.Yet You brought light and love into this world. Through You we not only have love, we can share that love with others. Thank You for Your priceless sacrifice on a Cross that brought love into our lives.