How God Loved | His Glory My Joy, a blog of Author Luana Ehrlich

To Be Loved

August 18, 2021 1 comment

The words, “I don’t love you,” have to be the most hurtful words ever spoken. As human beings, we are born with the desire to be loved. Whether it’s romantic love, family love, brotherly love or even self love, God gave us the desire to be loved and to love God, others, and ourselves.

Love comes from God. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.” (1 John 4:7).

Because human love is so flawed by sin, none of us can ever love ourselves or another human being perfectly. In the same way, until we receive our glorified, perfected bodies, we can’t love God perfectly.

God has no such hindrances. He loves perfectly. On three different occasions, the prophet Daniel was told by the angel Gabriel that he was greatly loved by God. “I have come to tell it to you, for you are greatly loved.” (Daniel 9:23). The same thought is expressed in Daniel 10: 11 and Daniel 10:19.

How sweet those words must have sounded to Daniel! How would you like to hear those words for yourself? Well, you can.

Paul says in Ephesians 2:4-5: “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses,made us alive together with Christ.”

God’s love is on display for us in Romans 5:8.“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Like Daniel, God sent word to us that we are greatly love. He sent His Word in the form of His Son who demonstrated how much he really loved us by paying the penalty for our sins by His death on the cross

Accept His love. Bask in His Love. Know His love for all eternity.

Categories: Christian Living, Devotionals, God's Love, God's Presence, God's Word, Love, Trust Tags: God's love, God's Love Revealed Image, How God Loved, Love, Love God's Word, Loved by God

There Should Be A Better Word

October 14, 2014 Leave a comment

I often play a word game on my iPad called Words With Friends. It’s very much like playing Scrabble, but, unlike Scrabble, you can try as many combinations of the letter tiles as you want until your word is accepted. Sometimes, you randomly arrange the tiles, and a word you never knew existed is accepted. (Out of curiosity, I often look up the definitions of these words, thus justifying the “educational value” of playing this game.)

But, there are many other times when I arrange the tiles into a nice-sounding word and discover that it’s not a real word. When that happens, I’m frustrated and sometimes think, “But this should be a word,” or “That’s such a descriptive-looking word, it should stand for something.”

When I’m reading the Bible, I come across a slightly different frustration, but it still involves a word describing a concept.

It happens when I’m reading about what God did for me in sending His only son to suffer the punishment I deserve. The Bible calls this “love.” Romans 5:8 “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Yes, this definitely encompasses the definition of love, but it’s so much more than this. That’s why I long for a better word, a more descriptive word, a word that is not used every day, a word that is exclusive for such an act as this.

Paul often uses a variety of words to expand on God’s “love” for us in such a sacrificial act. Titus 3:4-5 says, “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us . . . according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” (Emphasis mine)

After some meditation, I decided there is an all-encompassing word for God’s love after all, and it goes beyond “love” or any other related word.

It’s the word, “JESUS.”