God's extravagant love is our example.
10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
11 Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other.
19 We love each other because he loved us first. 20 If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? 21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters.
Love is one of the most over-used and most misunderstood words in the English language, I can love my corn flakes in my cereal bowl or I might love people that make me feel good, the word love must be very confusing to somebody learning English as a second language.
The Bible proves to us that God's love is a purposeful commitment to sacrificial action that isn't deserved. I wish that was an original idea but somebody thought of that definition and if you search the entire phrase it comes up all over the internet.
It is cool to think of the Bible as a love story from Genesis to Revelation we find that God is always pursuing his people that he chose to love no matter what. In today's scripture the apostle John gives us a picture of real love from God's example.
Love started with God, he lovingly made us and you might say we deserved his love at that point but soon after that he proved the depth of his love by continuing to love us after we became his enemy.
Ephesians 1:4-5 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.A great sacrifice was made so that I could have a peaceful and loving relationship with God. It is amazing to realize that I was so bad that God had to die for me but I am so loved that he wanted to die for me. How can you resist a love that made such an extravagant and willing sacrifice?
The natural thing for us to do would be to take the easy way out and choose hate but the Bible tells us that we don't have that option as children of God. Maybe hate is too strong of a word but we don't even have the right to withhold love.
If God chose love for me when I was so undeserving then I need to follow his example and do the same for everyone around me. I don't have a reason to not love somebody compared to the reason that God could have used to not love me.
Take a look all through the Bible and you will find God choosing to love people that disappointed him, people that turned their backs on him and chose to ignore him, that is the commitment that God made to me and I need to do the same.
