Grace Notes

"The Grace of God and the Love of God are nearly synonymous. The Grace of God is the Love of God in action, coupled with His power, forgiving our sins, transforming our lives, nurturing us in the new life, guiding us in His service, and preserving us for Eternity. 

Salvation begins with God's Grace and continues with a constant unfolding of the Grace, until He makes us His new work of art; a new creation in Christ."

These paragraphs are taken directly from the study notes in my personal Bible. Normally the notes provided are notoriously useless. Nine times out of ten if you read a difficult passage and glance down at the study notes to learn more about what the text means you'll be very disappointed.

Usually the notes will just completely ignore the passage and only talk about the verses above and below the one you're curious about. [Maybe that's why it's been such a great study Bible? I've never had the answers I needed so I've always had to search elsewhere to understand what the scriptures were saying.]

So, you can imagine my surprise when I glanced down at the notes one morning and read the passage above in my Bible. It was beyond amazing, really.

That's why I wrote it down and made a point to share it here on my blog.

My favorite part is the end where it says that God's Grace continues to unfold "...until He makes us His new work of art..."

Wow. So beautiful.

I also love the point about how the Love of God and the Grace of God are synonymous, and how God's Grace does more than simply save us. Yes, we are all "saved by Grace" but after that the work of Grace continues to lead us and to teach us and to empower us to put the words of Christ into action in our daily life.

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age…” [Titus 2:11-12]

We all come into the faith by God's Grace, but we also continue forward in the power of His Grace which enables us to walk in the Spirit and to put His Words into practice. 

Grace does more than save us and leave us alone. God's Grace is what makes it possible for us to love like Jesus - and to live as He did - here and now. 

Blessings,

-kg

LOVE IS A PERSON.

Love isn’t a concept. It’s not a feeling. According to the Bible, love is a person, and that person is God.

In the first epistle of John we read:

“The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-9)

“God is love, and the one who abides (lives) in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (1 John 4:15-17)

As I was reading through the first epistle of John recently I realized that there’s not much debate about the topic of love. See, once you establish that God is love and then you point out that we are commanded by Jesus to love one another, and to love those who do not love us in return, there’s only one thing left to do – love others.

Debating love and analyzing love and creating a strategy for love is mostly useless. Other than actually practicing love, there’s not much else to do about it. Maybe that’s why there are so few debates about these little epistles by the Apostle John?

So, God is love. This means that love’s origin is God. Apart from God there is no love. And by “love” here we do not mean the earthly, selfish, conditional love that most of us have grown up with. No, we mean the ultimate expression of love that is expressed in the Greek language as “Agape”. It is a love that is unconditional. It is a love that is based on the character and nature of the One who is loving, not on the one who receives that love.

In the Gospel of John, penned by the same author, we read where Jesus proclaimed:

“If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

Paul places an exclamation point on that by saying:

“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:8-10)

That means that if God is love, then Jesus is also love.

So, to know “love” we have to get to know the person, Jesus, who is love incarnate.

It also means that if we are like Jesus, then we will be loving as He is loving. That’s why He said, “They will know that you are my disciples (followers) if you love one another.” (John 13:35)

When we obey Jesus in this area of love we declare that we belong to Him, and we also express to Jesus that we love Him in return.

Love is not an emotion. It is not a feeling. It is a person. His name is Jesus. Get to know Him.

-kg

SATURATION POINT

Our house church family recently explored the idea of God’s amazing love for all of us. As we read scripture after scripture about how God’s thoughts about us are more numerous than all the sand on the planet, and how God rejoices over us with singing, and how God would rather die than live without us, a few people began to confess that this truth was almost too much to believe.

Immediately, several others nodded and said they felt the same. So, I took the opportunity to just begin to confess to God that we had trouble fully receiving the awesome reality of His love for us. I asked Him to help us, as a Body of believers, to really see, and to know like never before, that we really are loved with an everlasting, sacrificial, extravagant love.

As I prayed, the verse in Ephesians where Paul prayed something nearly identical for the ekklessia in that city came to my heart:

“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:14-19)

Over the next few days, I began to experience the fruit of that prayer in my own life. My early morning prayer times shifted into simple times of reflection on God’s love for me. Sometimes I would just lay on the carpet and say, “Ok, God, please show me how high…how wide…how long…how deep…your love for me really is.”

More and more I’ve begun to grow more aware of His love as I go through my day. My times alone with God have started to become less about doing stuff (i.e. – praying, worshipping, reading the Bible, etc.) and less about my expectations for wisdom or knowledge or revelation. Instead, I’m realizing that this is a relationship with a living, loving being who deeply and desperately loves me with a fierce and unending passion.

Yes, I know, I don’t deserve His love, but He’s drenching me with that love just the same. He loves me because He is love and love is what He does best.

After a few days of meeting with the Lord like this, and simply asking Him to reveal the love that surpasses knowledge to me, I had a small epiphany: I don’t need God to do anything different in my life. I don’t need Him to give me anything extra. He’s already pouring out His boundless love to me – and has been my entire life – so all that I really need is to have eyes to see the astounding love of God that is already all over me and around me.

In other words, you and I are swimming in God’s phenomenal love right now. His unintelligible love is in our lungs, our hair, our food, our field of vision. There’s nothing we can experience that isn’t doused in His limitless love for us. What we need most is to have the power (as Paul suggests) to grasp the scope of this unspeakably awesome love that God is blasting us with twenty four hours a day. Even while we’re sleeping God’s love is singing over us like a still, small lullaby of unearned adoration.

My prayer for you, and for myself as well, is that we could all receive the gift of knowing the love of God more and more in our hearts and lives. The funny thing is how meditating on God’s love will change your attitude. It makes it nearly impossible to be in a bad mood. It makes it very difficult to stay angry at someone. It makes it challenging to look at other people without being confounded by God’s love for them as well.

May we all have the power to grasp this magnificent love of Christ, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment.

Amen.

-kg