Skip to main content

The Presence of Love

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him [1 JOHN 4:15-16]
The love of God publicly proven in the coming of Jesus was not merely a love displayed to us, it is a love intimately experienced by us! One of the most important truths repeatedly stated by John is that God now lives in anyone who has hearted trust in Jesus as the Son of God.

Confessing Jesus as Son of God is not simply accepting Jesus is God, it is having trust in Jesus that shows evidence of a changed life of love . John is saying when we turn to Jesus, God comes and lives inside of us. Because God is love, we a life shared with God in love.

God living in us generates an inner confidence that God really does love us and this is what enables us to love other people as well! Because Jesus lives in us and us in Him we now have inner confidence that we belong to God and that God has loving given himself to us.

Being a follower of Jesus is different from any other religion. Our faith in Jesus is a living, personal, dynamic and intimate relationship with God. God now lives you and you in Him. He talks to you through His Word and ministers to your heart through God the Spirit. You speak directly to Him in prayer and he hears you! This is personal intimate love to us.

American writer Elbert Hubbard famously said, “a friend is the person who knows all about you and yet still likes you”. If that is true God is best friend because He is the only friend who forgives us upfront and gives you all of himself to us. Sadly, we often forget that we have a fantastic deep loving personal relationship with God in our lives!

When pain and suffering strikes, we start doubting to ourselves - if God is present, why is he letting me go through me? Why all the silence? When we meet other Christians telling us how much God has done for them, we can feel jealous and start longing for some miraculous experience to validate our relationship with God - and when none comes we can lose our confidence in God’s love and become miserable.

When we face a particular temptation, may be to watch something we should not watch or pollute our bodies, we easily give in because we forget that God lives in us and He is personally loving us! If we remembered this truth we would resist many temptations!

John recognises that as long as we are in this world we will experience many doubts and failures ! But his message is simple: Be confident that God loves you because He has proven His love for you publicly in Jesus and He is personally present loving you from the inside! So, when you start doubting his love: turn to this passage of the Bible and reassure yourself of His love.

Love Series :


Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2017

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Do Not Be Anxious

Do not be troubled if you are poor - Christ Himself had no place to lay His head. Do not let the prospect of future hard times make you anxious about how you will endure, for "you will not be ashamed in evil days, and in times of famine you will be satisfied." God has said (Psalm 37:19) therefore, you must believe it. Do not be overly concerned with securing provisions for old age, for by all appearances, you may not live to see it. It is more than likely that you will reach your journey’s end sooner than expected. Your body is frail - it is already declining, greeting decay as its mother before it has even fully entered the hall of this world. The supports of your earthly tent are being loosened little by little. Take courage, O my soul, for soon the devil, the world, and the flesh will be crushed beneath your feet, and you will be welcomed into eternal mansions.   But even if the Lord prolongs your days to old age, He who brought you forth from your mother's womb will n...

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...