UNCHANGING LOVE
He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love. (Micah 7: 18 )
To be loved with the unchanging love of God is to surpass the concept of love that mere human love, even in its deepest form, could ever be capable of. In fact, so great and magnificent is the capability of God's love that we are unable to fully understand it, no matter how hard we try. God loves us at all times, even when we are disobedient to Him, even when we displease Him by our actions or our thoughts. His love is never changing, always constant. Paul writes to the Ephesians (2: 4-5): But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by Grace you have been saved). Jesus himself was Love personified. As the sacrificial Lamb of God He was the very love of God sent down to be amongst us. Such great love, and yet so much of mankind rejected Him then and continues to reject Him today and constantly question His relevance to modern times. Yet isn't God's just as relevant to the times in which we live, and even more so, if that’s possible. Are we any the less the children of God than those addressed by John when he wrote (1 John 3:1): See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. This means that to all of those who receive Him, and are thereby born of God, we can, even now, know Him as a child knows its father. Furthermore, in 1 John 4:7-8, which is regarded by many as one of John's greatest passages, he writes of love as being the supreme quality of God, making the statement that in fact God is Love. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. God reaches out to us with His love, and when it reaches down to us, covering us from head to toe, inside and out, it transforms us into new beings. We are recreated and renewed through the effect that it has on our lives. It is there for every one of us to receive, all we need to do is to hold out our hands in submission, our hearts committed to Him, and He will saturate us with His love so that we overflow with it. In such moments we experience the sound of His voice as He confides His will to us. Could ever love be so great that we could ever dream of this kind of love this side of Heaven?The whole message of the Gospel is one of love. In that stable, 2000 years ago love was personified in God's own Son, Jesus Christ. As we follow His walk upon this earth we see the whole story revealed as one of an immensely caring ministry, a ministry that declared God's unchanging love towards His creation, constantly. Proverbs 8:17 teaches and declares that I love those who love me, and those who diligently seek me will find me. We need to constantly seek His face, seeking always to present ourselves for Him to use, in order that His love may be revealed to others through the practise of our lives. There is a constant renewing of ourselves in Jesus Christ through the unchanging nature of the eternal God. The things of this world may come and go, transient in nature and frail in construction, and yet the one thing that never changes is God. Psalm 102:27 says of the unchangeable nature of God, But Thou art the same, and Thy years will not come to an end. Of Jesus Christ the scriptures tell us that He is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever. (Hebrews 13:8). It is this unchanging nature of God, this permanence about His relationship with His creation, that gives us the assurance of the constancy of His love. How can we even consider for one moment that we are able to forge ahead on our way through this life on our own, doing as we please, ignoring God's commands in the light of such selfless love that is heaped on such an undeserving world. Jude 21 tells us: keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.
If the infant in the stable personified Love all those years ago then we have only to look a few years down the line to see the final and greatest sacrifice that that Love could ever make. We turn our eyes towards the Cross and see, in the shadows, our Lord hanging there feeling the pain and the sorrow that He had taken upon Himself. There was no greater sacrifice that could be made, and none less that would have sufficed, for it was there at Calvary that He hung and suffered in the place of man, to pay the price for man's sinful nature. It was there that God demonstrated His all-powerful Divine love.
We can think of times in our own lives when we have been hurt by someone we love, and yet, even if we multiplied that feeling a hundred-fold it’s doubtful that we could even begin to experience the cost in pain that’s measured by the Cross. Perhaps, when if ever you are tempted to question the very existence of God then you should look to the Cross and consider Christ’s sacrifice, thinking consciously of the fact that it was made for you. Once you realise that fact then it is doubtful that you could ever consider the Cross in the same light again. I'm reminded of the words of the hymn that describes this so perfectly:
When I survey the wondrous cross,
on which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count as loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.
Hence we can see the pattern of the pathway to salvation and redemption:
- God’s Love poured out on us
- God’s Grace blessing us
- Recognition of Sin in our lives
- Recognition of our need for Repentance
- Acceptance of the gift of Salvation
We must ensure that we never allow one precious moment of it to be wasted. Let us grasp it so firmly that it will flood through us and shining both in us and out from us, in order that we might share it with others, in the name of Jesus Christ and by God’s Grace.
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