Ephesians 2:4
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy
This is why we give our lives to Jesus. To understand the fullness of the love of God takes a lifetime. The danger along the way to fully understanding His love for us is to dwell for a great period of time not truly grasping the fullness of His love and limping along with an imperfect picture of it, or better stated a mis-understanding of the Love of God. For example; we can easily mistake the love of God and His richness of mercy toward us as some sort of license to sin. When it would actually be His great love for us that is at the heart of the correction or discipline we may find ourselves walking through. A hypothetical example is when little 3 year old Johnny runs into the street he is oblivious of the danger he has put himself in and since he is incapable of understanding traffic laws because they are higher than his capacity to comprehend the best thing a parent can do is to give little Johnny a wallop on the backside to instill the fear of Daddy into him, so that his behaviour changes. That wallop is given out of love for Johnny. Now later on when Johnny is 11 or 12 years old he can then realize that it was his fathers love for him that motivated the discipline. It is the same for us, we find ourselves in a difficulty somehow designed and or filtered through the hand of God and it causes us to learn, in the future we will see that the lesson was for the greater good and that God had indeed ordained it specifically for us, and we are glad and blessed for it. There is where we understand a little bit more of the Love of God in our lives,
The love of God is not a hall pass but a fulfillment of the verse in
Philippians 1
6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
The love of God is the discipline of God which is at work guiding us to become conformed into the image of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
application
Today I will embrace the discipling of God, not shrinking from it as is my tendency
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