"Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God!" -1 John 3:1a
Indeed the Father's love for us is a love that far surpasses all understanding. God gives so much. He asks of us only by faith (or trust) to obey the Scriptures and seek to love Him with all of our heart. When we seek Him to, by His grace we are able to do just that, because this a work that He is willing and must wrought within us. Indeed, what a mighty and compassionate Father we have. He chastens us that we might be partakers of His holiness. He refines us that we may be broken and draw closer to Him; that we may spiritually mature in our walk with Him. We face all kinds of disappointments and setbacks in life. These are designed in the life of God's children to bring about an unwavering trust. The spiritually mature believer will not be insecure of the Father's love; believing one minute that He loves them and is for them, and then wondering the next minute if He really loves them or if they have done something to drive Him away. Oh how we should long to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Father, and Lord Jesus Christ; for such knowledge brings about a blessed assurance that gives peace surpassing all understanding; even in the midst of trouble and unstable situations! It may seem a far and unreachable life of sublime bliss in this life, but it is indeed possible to all who belong to God. There is no place we have to ascend to reach this state of peace. It is there already when we become a child of God through faith in Christ Jesus. All it requires is a willful surrender of ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to transform our thoughts and opinions to reflect who He truly is. The Father desires that we draw closer to Him in a true understanding of His perfect love so that we may know with all assurance, joy, and peace, the manner in which He has loved us. This assurance is stable, unshakable, and keeping grace in such an unstable and changing world. God's love molds us, helps us, loves us, and gives to us in abundance! When we sin, we are graced to feel sorrow for our sin. This sorrow at some point will lead to confession, and He is waiting to forgive us and to cleanse us from our sin.
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." I John 1:9
When we cry, He comforts us. When we have nowhere to turn, He is our refuge and tower of strength. When we fall apart, He picks us up and restores us. When we are hungry, He feeds us. When we are lonely, He is our beloved friend. Behold the manner of love that He has bestowed upon us as His children! The Father wants us so much to understand this. When we were in our sinful state His love reached down and pitied us and He provided the perfect sacrifice in Christ Jesus to save us from our sin. The distance between the throne of glory in the highest Heaven and the earth where the sinner lives is a great distance. That distance was so great that only God's love and wisdom, in the person of His dear Son, could ever span it. God has not only given in love to us eternal life in His Son, but has given to us love itself. It is this perfect love that enables us to be conformed to the nature of the Father. Because we have this marvelous love bestowed upon us, we are able to live such a life that exhibits the very nature of the Father. We are then witnesses that we are the children of God because we are partakers of His nature. When our whole self is surrendered in devotion to Him, our life becomes a life of wonderful, daily fellowship with Him. For His children, the love is there all the time. It has already been given to us and it is by the Holy Spirit that this love is shed abroad within our hearts. This is a sanctifying work as we are transformed more into the image of Christ. Without this work, our new nature is hindered to thrive and grow because our old nature has no tendency to move towards the Father. Any love we have towards God, whether it be the desire to serve our fellowman, to live holy and obedient lives unto Him or to simply be in His presence, He is the One who has placed this love within us; and it has been there from the moment we believed on His dear Son. Oh yes indeed, it originated with Him. This is the manner of love that has been given unto us that identifies us as sons and daughters. These things are merely the evidence that we are indeed the children of God; and we can praise and give thanks to the Father for this manner of love that has drawn us by His grace towards Him and others. The natural man has no desire or love for God, lest He be pleased to reveal this love to us in His Son, Jesus Christ. Once this marvelous revelation has occurred, He then begins to replace the stony heart we original have inherent to our carnal nature to give us a heart of full of His glorious love that is life-changing and a love like we have never known before. ". . . I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh . . ." -Ezekiel 11:19. A stony heart is one that is hardened by stubborn willfulness, callused by bitterness – it seeks its own way and it resents and rejects God's will. How it saddens the Father when we make the choice to hold on to our stubborn willfulness to be bitter and angry, thinking that we have the better solution. This is a lack of trust and must be broken in our lives. How it grieves His precious Spirit within us! When we become children of God, we have been given a new nature, but there is a transformation that has to begin in our hearts; a renewing that must take place, especially for the greatly wounded. The Father seeks to remove the hard, stony heart that has been hardened through continual wounds that have occurred in such a one; but all of us are blessed to have such a transformation that removes our old ways and habits of sin and unbelief and replaces them with the very nature of our Heavenly Father. The quicker and more willing we are to totally surrender to this transformation, the quicker He can make us into the image of His dear Son; and the more we will experience all of the blessings of walking in peace with the Father, even closer each day. We can experience the peace and tranquility in the midst of confusion and the turmoil of a fallen world. Great testimonies to the Father's love and light through Christ Jesus! The blessedness of a contrite heart is that God has been allowed to heal the wounds of the broken in heart through repentance wrought in them, and the love of God begins to do spiritual surgery on that heart by His healing and infilling love. Everyone who comes to the Father in faith must have this spiritual surgery. No surgery is the same; but tailored according to the individual. Nevertheless, the Lord wants His people to have a new beginning and a new hope within them, for if any man be in Christ, he is indeed a new creation (2 Coring. 5:17) The beautiful result is that all things that used to be a part of us are now being done away with, and God begins something anew. We have a desire to be with Him, to please Him, a love for His word, and a love for His people. We are truly transformed out of the darkness into His marvelous light!
"But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light;" – 2 Peter 2:9
This love provokes us to love one another. God's perfect love shed abroad within our heart helps us to see others as He sees them, with love, compassion, and mercy. I see this as love that comes given abundantly, that has the ability to not just possess a small part of us, but also completely fill our entire being! We can, with His divine love, love those who disagree with us or persecute us. We must ever seek to love as the Father loves, for we were undeserving ourselves to receive this love from Him. Nevertheless, His perfect mercy was extended to us to have a relationship with Him through His Son, and to experience all of the blessings of His fellowship and care. When we seek Him to give us the revelation of this abundant love that surpasses all understanding He is more than willing! The key is total surrender! There are many of God's people who are not able to truly understand Him fully as the loving Father that He is, and thus they become vulnerable to teachings and doctrines that give a distorted view of the Father. It is important that we diligently study the Word to know the true nature of the Father. Only this will bring about a blessed assurance that no one can take from us! The more He is revealed to us in the scriptures with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the more He will show us His many attributes that make up His nature. We will understand the scriptures in the way that was intended. We begin to see that He is holy, just, merciful, good, faithful, and sovereign. We begin to see His love in all of these attributes, and this revelation gives us the truth of His nature in all things and situations. This revelation not only gives us the understanding and knowledge of who He is, but this revelation has a transforming effect on our nature more and more as we meditate upon it. This love begins to shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions. We will know peace without fear. We will be able to love others more. This is how we are able to love others more and more with this same love. The Father has not only given us an understanding that it exists, but He has, in mercy and loving grace, abundantly bestowed it upon us; and as a result we are thus identified with Him as being His sons and daughters. This is a love that we are able to show to others by the work of the Holy Spirit. We will begin to love others who may mistreat us because we will understand that it is by the mercy of the Father that we are where we are, and not by any of our own doing. We will make mistakes and err, but because of the transforming work that is taking place within our hearts, we will seek forgiveness, having a love for righteousness wrought within us. It will not matter how it makes us appear before man to admit our failures or mistakes because we will gradually diminish the need to ambitiously preserve or prove ourselves more and more as we begin to take on the nature of the Father. In fact, the more we discover just how sinful and deceptive the self can be, we will seek to shed the self that can never please God, to allow the new nature of Christ Jesus within us to grow. The Father will have given us a desire only for righteousness and for what pleases Him.
The Father's Love Is A Redeeming Love
In speaking of the love of the Father; His just nature cannot be left out. His just nature and perfect love are inseparable. There are some who like to create an imaginative view in their own mind of God being a God of love without being just. This paints a distorted picture that sin is overlooked in God's love toward mankind. This cannot be, for His holiness demands that all sin be punished, but His love has provided the plan and way of redemption for sin in Christ Jesus. In His great mercy, He has reached down to the sinful man and made a way for us to come up to His standard of righteousness. Only a perfect love could and would do this! God's love provided the cross of Jesus, by which man can have forgiveness and cleansing. It was the love of God toward us that sent Jesus Christ to the cross! It was His good pleasure to give us His only begotten Son to redeem us and reconcile us back to Him. Oh, what manner of love that was bestowed upon us, making us the children of God by faith!
"God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life." John 3:16
"In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins." (1 Jn 4:9-10)
The Father's Love Is a Sovereign Love
"But after that the kindness and love of God appeared to men, not by works of righteousness which we have done but according to His mercy He saved us." Titus 3:4,5
I believe the most amazing thing that I discovered about the Father's love is that His love for me was not based on anything that I had ever done; but merely because His very nature is to love. He is the standard for perfect love. It all stems from His tender mercies. I believe the most liberating revelation given to me by the Holy Spirit and the scriptures was that there was nothing that I ever did or could do that could draw this love toward me (if it depended upon that); but His sovereign love reached down in mercy and provided a way to reconcile me back to Him; making me His beloved adopted child through Christ Jesus! There was, on the other hand, everything in me to repel His love because of the nature that I was born with in this world and Him being a Holy God; and yet He predetermined that too, by giving me a new nature born of His Spirit. He loved all of us, not for what we were, but in spite of what we were. We can see this wonderful testimony in the life of Paul, who considered himself "the chief of sinners." It never ceased to amaze him how the Lord took the life of one who, in his zeal, persecuted many Christians, and yet transformed his very nature so much so that he would become one of the greatest apostles that ever lived. It was amazing to Paul how the Lord could love someone who raged against His people and persecuted them, to give Himself as a sacrifice to save him, and use him in great service to the kingdom of God and to the body of Christ. In our daily walk with the Lord, we will often fall into sin; sometimes, even fall in a really big way. When a child of God sins against Him, it is hard to believe that the Father still loves them. There are many other situations in life that don't necessarily mean one is living in immoral sin, but spiritually crippling bondages from the past that the Lord needs to break them free from. It is the enemy's desire that they hold on to these captive thought patterns and behaviors, rather than trusting the Father to fully free them from them. This causes them to be in the driver's seat, instead of God, and they stop living by faith in Him. Life is indeed miserable for them until they can come to truly accept the fact that, in Christ, the Father loves them as His own children. If "God so loved the world..." (John 3:16), specifically sinners, then certainly He loves His own children with a special love. A Christian will sin on occasion; sometimes sin greatly. Whatever sins, whether past, present, or future, that we've committed, the Bible tells us that if we truly confess our sin to God (agree with Him that it was wrong, see it from God's perspective as a sin that you want to avoid in the future), He is faithful and just to forgive your sin and cleanse you from all your unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Accepting the Father's love is the first step in experiencing His love that is already there for us. To really know God's love and experience it daily, means believing that He has granted you the gift of eternal life -- "that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but hath eternal life" (John 3:16) -- the gift of knowing God personally (John 17:3). The word "believe" means to affirm, trust, and commit -- all at the same time. The love of God is fitting through believing in Him who gives eternal life. This eternal life is not only for once we reach Heaven. Jesus said, "I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). Eternal life starts the moment you repent of your past sins and give your heart in trust to Jesus Christ. Through Christ, you can experience His love in a personal relationship in time and for eternity with the Creator who loves you more than you can even understand.
-You have His love in the morning in renewed tender mercies that give you a reason to get out of bed.
-You have His love in the afternoon to help you get through a really bad time on the job.
-You have His love in the evening to comfort you when the bills are not paid, the children are tired and complaining, and work around the house is still waiting to be finished.
-You have His love when you are falsely accused.
-You have His love when you lose your best friend.
In all of life we have His love available to us. This is a sure thing that we can depend on. We experience His love as we believe in Him and commit ourselves (and our situation) to Him. The Father is fully aware of our situation and will walk through it with us. That is His promise: "Never will I leave you, nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5 ). We should rejoice in the love that has already been given to us from the Father and trust in this love by seeking daily by His grace to give ourselves completely to His perfect, divine will.
I am coming more and more to believe that the love of God is the vital key to overcoming in the life of a Christian. I say this truly from the heart. The Lord has shown me how at first I was missing this vital key from my Christian life, when I constantly sought Him to help me understand how to have the mind of Christ and to love and serve others as Christ did. I had many troubles that always seemed to bog me down; feeling unsure of my salvation being one, adopting legalistic views, and many times in fear and uncertainty. Of course, the Father did not want me to live this way. I was His child, and He loved me as His child, and no parent wants to see their child living in such ignorance of their love. A good parent will always seek to be sure that their child fully understands the amount of love they have for them. They want them to always feel that assurance that no matter what happens in life, they will always have their love. Now, the Father wants to do that and much more for us who are in Christ. He has already predestined us who are in Christ Jesus to be His eternal sons and daughters. We are in His family and being born into a family of the most faithful Father is a sure and everlasting covenant.
"For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren" - Romans 8:29
We can have the assurance of eternal life as children of God, but the Father desires that we begin to walk in newness of spiritual life here in this earthly realm. He desires that we know Him and can fully trust our lives to Him. I believe our understanding of the manner of love given to us by the Father is one of the foundational keys to living the Christian life. If we do not have this understanding, we will not truly see Him for the loving Father that He is to us, and our relationship with Him is greatly affected. Without this understanding, we cannot fully experience the fruits of love, joy, peace, and stability already provided for us that come with a true understanding and trust in His love, and therefore, we cannot pass this on to others.
It is especially important among ministers who serve the needs of others to seek out the Father to give them a revelation of this foundational truth if they do not have it. Holding a distorted view of the Father's love will cause any minister's doctrine to be distorted and this can have a serious effect on those to whom they minister who are spiritually hungry for the true word of God. The Father will always honor our petitions when we seek to draw near to Him in faith, seeking to know Him as a real Father. It is a relationship that the Lord desires with us. He has a Divine purpose in this. From our relationship with Him pours forth an abundance of love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, kindness, temperance (self-control), faithfulness, and long-suffering (patience). We are blessed as well as others. The Lord has promised to keep in perfect peace those whose mind is stayed on Him "because he trusts in Thee" (Isaiah 26:3). We will have trials and tribulations in this world, that is promised, but it doesn't have to affect our peace and joy when we are aware of the love and faithfulness of the Father. When we have the peace of God, we can supernaturally rise above the tribulations that we face in life with complete victory! Because our trust is a complete and unwavering trust in the Father, we can mount up with wings of an eagle, rising above the storm. We will run and not be weary. We will walk and not faint. If we have a lack of faith or trust in the Father and His word, we will find it hard to rise above the storms of life and we will needlessly suffer. This is why understanding the Father's love toward us is so important, and He desires this of His children.
Our lack of faith, not only affects us, but we convey that lack of faith to others. We are one living body with many parts under the headship of Christ. We each have a ministry, and our ministry and walk with the Lord will always have an effect on others in the body of Christ as well as ourselves. It can prove to be a blessing in our daily lives to us, and others, or it can prove to be the reverse. Knowing the Father's love more and more in our lives as a true reality should be our greatest aim. From a vessel filled with the Father's love pours abundant love that supplies what the body of Christ needs to function as one.
"But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." Ephesians 4: 15,16
Our Christian walk and ministry does not work without the Father's love being shed abroad within our hearts. It doesn't matter what doctrine you hold, you will only prove to have an intellectual or emotional understanding of God's word or man's opinions if your actions are not guided by the Holy Spirit's leading. All things must be surrendered to the Holy Spirit in order for Him to "guide us into all truth" (John 16:13). We can be trusting of our own hearts and hold back from giving certain areas to the Father to control, but this self-deception will keep us from a maturing relationship with the Lord, and as ministers will greatly affect our ministry. This is why Paul tells us in Galatians 5:16 to "walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh." We need the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth as He was sent to do, because "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?" -Jeremiah 17:9. Only the Father can reveal the true condition of the heart by the Holy Spirit. The heart alone is deceptive when we allow it to dictate our actions. It is more deceitful than anything. The word says it is deceitful above all things, even the cunning deceitfulness of the serpent. It will deceive itself and others. Only the truth can reveal it's darkened state. That is the truth given by the Holy Spirit to us through the word of God. When I came to see the truth unveiled by the Holy Spirit to me concerning the manner of the Father's love, only could He then in turn begin to minister this love and doctrine purely through my messages to others. Only as I received the right understanding of this truth could I be graced to see how a lack of this truth was effecting my walk with Him and my ministry. I could not go deeper until this was revealed. There is always room for us all in Christ to grow to spiritual maturity. We are constantly being conformed into His image, and this takes time and the dissecting of incorrect thoughts and actions so that they line up with God's truth. If one cannot humble themselves to the Father's truth when it is revealed, then pride seeps in and the enemy has an advantage to really effect their Christian walk and ministry. Without meekness and humility, wounded hearts remain unhealed; without surrender, angry hearts grow more and more bitter, critical hearts will have less and less of the Father's mercy, and such a one will go through life missing the opportunities for true service and an enriching and fulfilling relationship with the Father and others. This need not be so, when the Father has given us every opportunity to live in the light of a right relationship with Him through Christ. The love of many in the church is slowly growing spiritually cold because they are unaware of the Lord's love that has been provided for them. They aren't aware that their greatest weapon against Satan's attacks is the blessed assurance of the Father's love for them. This is why Satan is successfully able to keep many Christians needlessly weighed down and full of burdens. All actions, thoughts, and feelings will stem from this one truth in our daily lives. This revelation of the Father's love has the power to transform us more and more into the very image of Christ, day by day. This is about the victory that Christ achieved for us as God in the flesh. He was the only One who overcame sin and death in the flesh. With His Spirit living in us, we have the promise of becoming the same when Christ comes in redemption, and we have the promise that we can have abundant life here and now in this world through abiding in Christ. The enemy knows this and seeks to keep many satisfied with mere information of who the Father is and of His word, without the transforming life of the Father to be at work in their lives by faith. This is a subtle deception that the enemy seeks to seduce many with just as he did Eve in the garden of Eden. The Father wants to give us abundant life and for us to trust Him and His word enough to surrender ourselves that He may be glorified and seen in us.
"The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." John 10:10
"For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us" -2 Corinthians 4:6-7.
Satan's antichristian spirit, already present in the world (I John 4:3) denies the power of Christ at work in the life of the Christian because he denies that the Father came in the flesh to defeat the works of sin and death. Satan is ever seeking to exhalt himself from the moment of his rebellion in Heaven, and he will seek to use a child of God to exhalt him in their lives, if allowed, in order that the glory that belongs to God turns instead to him. He seeks to rob us of the transforming, life changing relationship with the Father that gradually conforms us to the very image of Christ Jesus. (Romans 12:22) At Christ's coming, we have the promise of being completely transformed into the image of Christ so that the war of sin and death is eternally defeated (I John 3:2). This is the blessed hope that we wait for with patience. Satan does not want the works of the old carnal and sinful nature to be destroyed in the life of the Christian. Since he cannot have the soul of a Christian, he seeks to rob them of the blessings of living and walking by the Spirit of God. His agenda is to rob us of life; to devour. The word of God tells us this and how we can keep him at bay.
"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." –I Peter 5:8
In order to be sober you must be clear-minded. If the renewing of our minds are not being constantly done by the word and Spirit of God, we cannot be spiritually clear-minded. Only a doer of the word will produce fruitful works of the Father from which no one can boast. Self-deception causes us to be only hearers of the word and not doers.
"But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass" – James 1:22
"Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, And in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom." –Psalm 51:6
The Lord desires that we take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. There leaves no room for self-deception. We are not to be conformed to the ways of the world or influenced by it or the opinion of others. We are to allow our minds to be renewed by the word of God at all times. This is part of the important putting on of our spiritual armor (Ephesians 6). When one looks into a mirror he sees his face and that is it. The mirrored image does nothing to show him what he truly is within. It is a shallow surface image that he immediately forgets after walking away. However, when he takes an honest look into the word of God, he sees much more because the word of God cuts to the heart of the matter. It discerns the true condition of the heart and the mind. This matters more than what can be seen merely on the surface. This is what we must pay close attention to do for ourselves. A self-examination honestly in light of the word of God.
"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." - Hebrews 4:12-13.
Anytime the Father is not exalted in any area of our lives, we are robbed even more of the blessings of communion with Him and fruitful ministry. We are either seeking to walk in the Spirit or remaining captive to our carnal natures. There is no gray area here. If we are not seeking to grow spiritually, we are seeking to satisfy carnal desires instead of our Father's perfect will. A lack of surrender to Him produces a lack of total assurance; a shaky faith that is unstable. We are to be vigilant, and always mindful of the enemy so that he cannot affect our mind in any fashion. A constantly renewed mind will prove to be a powerful weapon against self-deception and the enemy's attacks. The Father wants us to have victory over the carnal nature, the enemy, and the world, and has given us the most powerful weapon against them, and that is to love Him with all of our hearts, and to love one another. The Father wants us to understand how to abide in His perfect love that has been bestowed upon us already in abundance. He desires that we know Him truthfully. Are we willing to draw near to Him in full assurance of faith, surrendering all to Him? In such unstable and increasing spiritually deceptive times, we may do well to begin to learn how to come into the ark of refuge; in the Father's love and remain there. For only there will we find peace, rest, and assurance. The Father bids us "Come!"
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