God's Love through Christ for Life
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. (I John 4:9)
I Jn. 4:1-12; Jer. 31:3; Jn. 3:16 and 10:10-11; Rom. 5:8, 18; II Cor. 5:19; I Pet 2:24
What Is God Saying?
John needed to sound a clear note on the trumpet. He needed to send a clear light to penetrate the clouds of doubt that were settling around Christians many years after Jesus lived and taught and far from where He died and rose again. Eyewitnesses to the reality of God's love as seen on the Cross and to God's power as shown in the Resurrecti0n were getting scarce. A new generation of Christians was being challenged and sometimes confused by false teachings.
Platonic thought, dominant in Greek culture, taught that the spirit was all-important. Matter was essentially evil; hence Jesus may have been the real God but not the real Man. John established the fact that the real God was real Man by personal knowledge, seeing, hearing, and touching (I Jn. 1:1). Anything other than our Lord's true deity and true humanity would make Christ's real death on the Cross for man's real sin, a fanciful charade, a cruel mistake. ‘He bore our sins in his own body on the cross’ (I Peter 2:24). He did so as God; He did so as Man. To believe otherwise nullifies the pivotal truth of Christianity that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ and showing through His love that we ought to love one another.
How Does This Apply To Us?
It was the infinite love of the Creator God that brought Him to earth in human form in Jesus Christ. He came to us that we might come to Him. He paid the price of love so that we might have the gift of life. From this great truth, we see the enormity and painful reality of man's sin, God's forgiveness as blessed release, God's Word as our complete assurance of life here and hereafter, and God's love as the perfect answer to all our problems with ourselves and others. In blending the themes of love and light and life, John gives us a rainbow, a rainbow that encircles a Cross on a lonely hill and promises salvation, hope, and peace forever.
The Gospel of John was written to bring us to faith. This letter of John was written to keep our faith alive and glowing in a world that is still bent on drowning the light of God's truth in the darkness of man's indifference, pride, and doubt. But light will prevail. Love will conquer. Through God's Son, we have life.
Pray With Me
Beginning of all life, source of all love, Father of all our spirits, I thank You for the grace that meets me at my deepest level of need. I thank You for showing me in a new light why Jesus came, "God's love through Christ for life." Your perfection and power are seen in the created wonders of the universe. Your justice and wisdom shine in the moral law which man never breaks but to find himself broken. Yet behind and beyond it all, like the afterglow of a rapturous sunset, is Your love. With speechless wonder, I bow in the presence of such quiet splendor ... endless, flawless, unfailing love … God!
Yet I thank You, Father, that Your love has not remained distant, like a sun-drenched cloud that I can neither reach nor hold, a principle I can neither deny nor understand, an ideal that beckons but a reality that betrays. For Your love has come to me through Christ. There is no doubting or debating the love of Calvary. There is nothing vague about the point of a nail. The crown of thorns was no misty cloud. ‘Father, forgive,’ was not a thesis outlined in the classroom.
‘God's love through Christ for life.’ ‘He came that we might have life.’ Let there be nothing to hinder Your creative love in Christ from doing its finished work in me. Without Your love, there is no life. All that we call having is but dying unless it is rooted in Your love. Lord, You manifested Your love in Christ that I might live; now manifest Your life in me that He might be glorified.
In the confidence and joy of faith, I offer this prayer through Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Amen.
Moving On In The Life of Prayer
Prayer has no meaning when we imagine it to be a kind of magic wand that we can wave and get the things we want. It becomes powerful when we view it as a means of discovering the things God wants, for us and through us. That is the reason for ending our prayers with the phrase, ‘In Jesus' Name.’ It is vitally important to be where He wants us to be, doing what He wants us to do. Then prayer speaks to our real needs, solves our real problems, and satisfies our deepest longings. Let the love of God be manifested through Christ, in prayer, and for life in us, our life for Him.
