A description of the course that explains what you will learn and how it will help you grow closer to Jesus
4 lessons
4 lessons
4 lessons
Love consists in this: God loved us first
When I was 24, I lived in an underprivileged neighborhood, worked as a campus minister, and actively served in my church. One day, as I went for a run, I started a sermon on my iPod to maximize both the physical and spiritual benefits. But as healthy as I was, I found myself limping home in agonizing discouragement.
Why? The sermon asked me to consider the heart motivations behind my behavior. As I asked God to show me why I was so religious, he revealed an uncomfortable answer: I wanted to control God. If I did so much for him, then I felt God would owe me a happy marriage.
During that run, God turned my heart around. Instead of considering how God would respond to my love for him, I started to ask how I would respond to God's love for me. But this shift was excruciatingly difficult. With God's help, I started to give up control and live in dependence upon God's unconditional love for me.
When we search our hearts, we realize that we need God. We need his love, his forgiveness, and his help. How will we handle our problems on our own? If we even have the courage to ask the question: Can we handle what comes after death?
Our familiarity with Christmas can dull our spiritual senses. But it's a shocking miracle that God loves us so much that he sent his Son not just to be a baby in a manger, but the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God's lavish love exposes our own impoverished view. In a season where nearly everyone is asking what they will get, God's invitation is to remember what he has already given. When our rituals are designed to provoke sentimentality, God is showing us that true love looks like joyful sacrifice.
So how do we know if we have unwrapped God's gift of love?
1 John makes it clear: as God has loved us, we also must love one another.
1 John 4:9-11
God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.
Listen to or sing Charles Wesley's hymn, "And Can It Be That I Should Gain?" What strikes you about this song?
Why do you love God?
What's one way you could love someone else as God has loved you this week?
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