Love, Acceptance, and Respect.
Humans need love, acceptance, and respect. We also need to love.
God created you with a need to be loved and to love.
Sadly, many have missed the love from parents and family members. Divorce created broken homes, where single parents struggled to pay the bills and care for the children and household, without a father present in the home.
Many children of divorced families grow up starving for love and acceptance. Some turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, food, sports, and many other things to “feel” accepted, if only for a short time.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines love as:
“an intense affection for another person based on familial or personal ties.”
Many times sexual attraction can imitate true affection.
We love other people because they make us feel loved and accepted.
Human love is a conditional love.
Human love based on emotions and feelings can change from one moment to the next. Divorce rates soar due to husbands and wives “falling out of love.” This broken love passes onto the children, who will grow up to pass it on to their children. Sins of the father are passed on for several generations.
God loves you unconditionally.
I John 4:8 tells us that “God is Love.”
John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
We as humans reject God because we desire to be our own god. We don’t like others telling us what to do and when to do it. We like doing things our own way.
Romans 5:8, “But God commends His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
God doesn’t say, you have to clean up first before He loves you. He loves you before you clean up. This doesn’t mean He can fellowship freely with us while we are disobedient. He can not dwell with sin. Sin places a barrier between His Holy Spirit and our human spirit. Sin breaks fellowship and must be repented of before we can intimately fellowship with God as our Heavenly Father.
Cleaning up makes Him happy because it shows that you are returning His love. We make our parents happy when we obey them. We love our spouses when we seek to please them.
Our sins make us unlovable to God. God is Holy and cannot dwell with sin. The sinless Blood of Christ has to cover our sins before God can indwell our human spirit with his Holy Spirit.
God’s love is not based on feelings and emotions, nor on you being lovable or unlovable: He loves us because He is the source of all love.
Susie as an adopted ten-year-old answered her adopted father, “Daddy, I finally got to go to Disney World. But it wasn’t because I was good; it’s because I am yours.”
God has adopted you into His family as a son or as a daughter. It has nothing to do with being good. It has everything to do with being His.
God is Love and He Loves YOU!