Good Friday, March 29 at 7 p.m. - Night of worship, communion, and scripture reading
Easter Sunday, March 31 - Services at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. & Egg hunt at 10:15 a.m.

20220313_Announcements Slides (3)

"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."
- 1 John 4:8

This is an incredibly blunt statement by the Holy Spirit writing through the apostle John. He's saying that if you don't love other people, you don't actually know God. To put it another way, if you hate your neighbor, you haven't met your Creator. But just what is God's love? Theologian J.I. Packer defined God's love this way, "God's love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners whereby, having identified with their welfare, he has given his Son to be their Savior, and now brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation." God shows his love for us by sending Jesus. You see, Jesus is God's love made visible. While he could have rightly left us in our sin, God showed his love to us by sending his Son to save us and bring us into a covenant relationship with him. Jonty Rhodes helpfully explains that "a covenant is a conditional promise." So Jesus kept the conditions that God commanded us to keep and has promised to bless all who trust in him by faith. This means that the person and work of Jesus is God's love on display for all to see and enjoy.

So what does this mean for your life? Well, have you come to the end of yourself and embraced Jesus as your Savior? Come to Jesus by faith and experience the love of God for yourself. He lived a perfectly obedient life and died as a substitute for sinners on the cross so all who trust in him might be forever forgiven. Secondly, has the love of God changed how you relate to others? Do you love your neighbor? It's easy to love people who love you or agree with you but do you love those who hate you and disagree with you? If you don't love the person who looks differently than you, who comes from a different part of town than you, who thinks differently than you, who votes differently than you - than you don't know God. We love because he first loved us. He is the God of love.

For Jesus,
Pastor Mark

Write a Comment

Comments for this post have been disabled.