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REAL POWER: MAXING OUT ON GOD'S LOVE |
THE FACTS OF LOVE
No matter what your age, you need to
learn the facts of love. The most important fact is that God is
love. The more you know about God’s love, the better you understand
what God is like. Here is a list of some of the things the Bible says
about love:
1.
Love is patient.
2.
Love is kind.
3.
Love is not quick to take
offence.
4.
Love keeps no score of wrongs.
5.
There is nothing love cannot
face.
6.
Love never fails.
The complete list is found in the
Bible in I Corinthians chapter thirteen. Until you have a good
understanding of love, you will not understand how God loves you. You
need to look at yourself through God’s eyes of love to understand what
it means to be one of his children.
Jesus taught that God’s love knows no
bounds. Jesus said, “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will
find; knock, and the door will be opened. For everyone who ask
receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be
opened. Is there a man among you who will offer his son a stone if he
asks for bread, or a snake when he asks for fish? If you, then, bad
as you are, know how to give your children what is good for them, how
much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask
him?”
From his personal experience, Jesus
knew that the Father’s love was far greater than the love any human
could muster. An earthly Father’s love for his children pales in
comparison with God’s love for his children. God never holds anything
back if it’s good for his children. It’s worth examining certain
aspects of God’s love so we understand what it means for God to love
us.
GOD IS PATIENT
I am not a patient person. I have a
busy life and many responsibilities that are part of the practice of
medicine. I don’t have enough hours in a day to get everything done.
For my entire professional career, I have had a high performance style
of living and working. It’s not that I want to live that way, it’s
just part of the job.
Seeing patients in the middle of the
night in the emergency room can’t be avoided. If I don’t go to the
E.R., I lose my hospital privileges. Being on call isn’t an optional
activity. When I practice medicine, large chunks of my time are swept
away by activities mandated by government regulations, hospital
policies and procedures, and the needs of my patients.
With so many people telling me what
to do, time becomes a scarce commodity. When someone wastes my time,
they waste my life. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever I
feel impatient. You can thank your lucky stars that I am not God.
God is a lot different from me. He
is responsible for running the entire universe. There are billions of
people living on planet earth, and He has time for each one.
Amazing! God must have big eyes and ears because He is watching over
a lot of people and listening to what they say. And He is not
impatient.
I have two grown children, and I can
tell you I have cut them both a lot of slack while they were growing
up. I can also tell you the amount of slack I cut for my children is
insignificant compared with the amount God has cut for me. Without
God’s love and patience, right now I would be ordering an extra heavy
duty asbestos suit to protect me from the fires of hell. It’s not
that I have been a particularly bad person, but I am not a saint, and
patience isn’t one of my virtues.
How strange it seems that God is
eternally patient with my mistakes, but I have such a difficult time
being patient with the weaknesses of others. God must love us all a
lot to not wipe us off the face of the earth.
When my eyes are weak, and I can’t
see his plan, God is patient. When my ears are dull, and I don’t
listen to his voice, God is patient. When I should do what’s right,
and instead do what’s wrong, God is patient. When I wander aimlessly
year after year, God is patient.
God has always been with me in the
past, He is with me in the present, and He will accompany me into the
future. He will stick with me to the end, trying to get his message
of love through my thick skull, because He is patient.
God is also patient with you. No
matter how many serious mistakes and failures you have made, God is
patient with you. You may think you are the straw that broke the
camel’s back, but you will never break the back of God’s patience and
love. God will be patient with you until the end, because He wants
you to open your heart to his love. He wants you to become one of his
children and to max out on his love.
GOD IS KIND
God does not have an army of
religious police or enforcers making sure you do his will. There is
no God Squad.
I have lived outside the United
States for more than twenty-five years, and I have seen plenty of
people who believed they were the God Squad. They were the religious
police who made it their business to force their rules and regulations
on everyone else. Some of the religious police were free lance
operators on their own special mission. Others were appointed by the
religious authorities in their respective countries.
All of these individuals have a
strong need to be right, and they don’t hesitate to use physical
threats and other forms of intimidation to bring you into compliance
with their world view. Sometimes the civil authorities have the
regular police accompany the religious police in order to keep the God
Squad from getting out of control. The God Squad is always consumed
with the need to be right. You either do what they say or suffer the
consequences. These misguided and malignant individuals don’t
understand that God is kind.
If anyone had the power to win
through intimidation, it would be God. But God would never beat you
into submission, because God is kind. It would be easy for God to hit
you with a bolt of lightning to get your attention. A few awesome
displays of his power should be sufficient to get you to do exactly
what He wants. But that’s not the way God works.
God is kindly disposed to you, and He
will have a relationship with you based on love, or it will not happen
at all. God isn’t going to do any pushing and shoving to force you
into line. The God who is patient is also kind. That is why He gave
you a free will, and you can decide whether you want to respond to his
overture of love.
Don’t mistake God’s kindness for
weakness. Although God will not win through intimidation, He will
eventually win the battle against the evil that runs rampant in the
world. And when accounts are settled, those who don’t have a personal
relationship with him based on love will have a relationship based on
judgment. You will reap what you sow, because that is the law of the
moral universe.
This isn’t an attempt to scare you
into becoming one of God’s children. It merely points out you are
responsible for the choices you make, and some of your choices
determine where you spend eternity.
God is a kind God, and He will do
everything possible to see that you are one of his children. He will
do everything except use force.
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Excerpt:
REAL POWER - MAXING OUT ON GOD'S LOVE
David J. Abbott M.D.
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RED SEA CHRONICLES DVD
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