GOD-LOVE
Resolved, to
examine carefully, and constantly, what that one thing in me is, which causes me in the least to doubt of the love of God; and to
direct all my forces against it.
Resolution Number 25.
The greatest
sorrow and burden you can lay upon the Father, the greatest unkindness you can
do to Him is not to believe that He loves you.
John Owen
Quoted in: Jerry Bridges, Transforming Love, Tabletalk
Magazine, May 2004, p. 17. Used by Permission.
God did not
demand that we first demonstrate our allegiance to Him before Christ would
agree to die in our place. To demand that we somehow show ourselves deserving
of forgiveness in order to regain our status as His children would have been
futile. What can ungodly, rebellious sinners offer God that would move the holy
Creator of the universe to sacrifice His only Son on their behalf? So God acted
first, motivated solely by his own sovereign love, to grant mercy to His people
as the ultimate expression of His grace (Ex. 33:19; Isa. 63:7; Rom. 9:15-18;
Eph. 2:4; Titus 3:5; 1 Pet. 1:3). Christ died for us because the Father and the
Son loved the unlovable.
Scott Hafemann
The God of Promise and the Life of Faith,
Crossway Books, 2001, p. 125.
If I do not
believe in my heart (my awful predicament before Christ) – believe them so that
they are real in my feelings – then the blessed love of God in Christ will
scarcely shine at all. The sweetness of the air of redemption will be hardly
detectable. The infinite marvel of my new life will be commonplace. The wonder
that to me, a child of hell, all things are given for an inheritance will not
strike me speechless with trembling humility and lowly gratitude. The whole affair
of salvation will seem ho-hum, and my entrance into paradise will seem as a
matter of course. When the heart no longer feels the truth of hell, the gospel
passes from good news to simply news. The intensity of joy is blunted and the
heart-spring of love is dried up.
Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, Bethlehem
Baptist Church, 2002, p. 115.
What could
God give us to enjoy that would prove Him most loving? There is only one
possible answer: Himself! If He withholds
Himself from our contemplation and companionship, no matter what else He gives
us, He is not loving.
John Piper
Desiring God, Bethlehem Baptist Church, p.
48, used by permission, www.DesiringGod.org.
The deepest
need that you and I have in weakness and adversity is not quick relief, but the
well-grounded confidence that what is happening to us is part of the greatest
purpose of God in the universe – the glorification of the grace and power of
his Son – the grace and power that bore him to the cross and kept him there
until the work of love was done.
John Piper
Do you feel
more loved when God makes much of you or do you feel more loved when God at the
cost of His Son allows you to make much of Him?
John Piper
I measure Your love for me by the magnitude of the wrath I deserved
and the wonder of Your mercy by putting Christ in my place.
John Piper
Defending My Father's Wrath, June 26, 2006, www.DesiringGod.org, Used by Permission
I’d like to
propose that God’s love is much different and better than unconditional.
Unconditional love, as most of us understand it, begins and ends with sympathy
and empathy, with blanket acceptance. It accepts you as you are with no
expectations. You in turn can take it or leave it. But think about what God’s
love for you is like. God does not calmly gaze on you in benign affirmation.
God cares too much to be unconditional in His love… Such real love is hard to
do. It is so different from “You’re okay in my eyes. I accept you just because
you’re you, just as I accept everybody. I won’t judge you or impose my values
on you.” Unconditional love feels safe, but the problem is that there is no
power to it. When we ascribe unconditional love to God, we substitute a teddy
bear for the king of the universe… The word “unconditional” may be an
acceptable way to express God’s welcome, but it fails to communicate its
purpose: a comprehensive and lifelong rehabilitation, learning “the holiness
without which no one will see the Lord.”
David Powlison
Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers,
2003, p. 164,166,168-169.
God’s love is
active. He decided to love you when He could have justly condemned you. He’s
involved. He’s merciful, not simply tolerant. He hates sin, yet pursues sinners
by name. God is so committed to forgiving and changing you that He sent Jesus
to die for you. He welcomes the poor in spirit with a shout and a feast. God is
vastly patient and relentlessly persevering as He intrudes into your life. God’s
love actively does you good. His love is full of blood, sweat, tears, and
cries. He suffered for you. He fights for you, defending the afflicted. He
fights with you pursuing you in
powerful tenderness so that He can change you. He’s jealous, not detached. His
sort of empathy and sympathy speaks out, with words of truth to set you free
from sin and misery. He will discipline you as proof that He loves you. God
Himself comes to live in you, pouring out His Holy Spirit in your heart, so
that you will know Him. He puts out power and energy. God’s love has hate in it
too: hatred for evil, whether done to you or by you. God’s love demands that
you respond to it: by believing, trusting, obeying, giving thanks with a joyful
heart, working out your salvation with fear, delighting in the Lord.
David Powlison
Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers,
2003, p. 165.
[God’s love] is
at God’s initiative and choice; it isn’t given out on the basis of my
performance. God’s gospel love is not wages that I earn with a model life; it
is a gift. It is a gift that I cannot earn; more than that, it is a gift that I
do not even deserve. God loves weak, ungodly, sinful enemies. The gift is the
opposite of what I deserve. God ought to kill me on the spot. Instead, He sent
His Son to die in my place.
David Powlison
Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers,
2003, p. 167.
If you receive
blanket acceptance, you need no repentance. You just accept it. It fills you
without humbling you. It relaxes you without upsetting you about yourself – or thrilling
you about Christ. It lets you relax without reckoning with the anguish of Jesus
on the cross. It is easy and undemanding. It does not insist on, or work at,
changing you. It deceives you about both God and yourself. We can do better.
God does not accept me just as I am; He loves me despite how I am. He loves me just as Jesus is; He loves me enough to devote my life to renewing me in
the image of Jesus.
David Powlison
Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers,
2003, p. 169-170.
Christ died
not in order to make God love us, but because He did love His people. Calvary
is the supreme demonstration of Divine love. Whenever you are tempted to doubt
the love of God, Christian reader, go back to Calvary.
A.W. Pink
The Attributes of God, Baker Book House, p.
81.
While God is
not pleased with my sin and may discipline me in order to turn me from
destructive paths and practices, His love for me does not diminish in any
degree. He gave Himself for my sins in their entirety, so that I might have His
love in its entirety… Accepting this reality of God’s unchanging regard is
necessary for us to make progress in the Christian life.
Bryan Chapell
Holiness by Grace, Crossway, p. 54.
In such
trials God still truly blesses our faithfulness to him, but these blessings can
as well involve the mercy of removing us from the grasp of this world’s
pleasures as rewarding us with worldly delights (Heb. 12:11; Jas. 1:2-4).
Whether God chooses the ordinary path of rewarding our goodness with observable
blessing, or the extraordinary path of blessing our obedience with trials that
will strengthen our character and stretch our faith, His love is never lacking
(Heb. 12: 6-11).
Bryan Chapell
Holiness by Grace, Crossway, p. 25.
Christ’s
atoning work does not change God’s wrath to love, for God’s love is itself the
source of the atonement.
George Eldon Ladd
A Theology of the New Testament, Eerdmans,
1993, p. 466.
At no point
in Scripture is the term “loved by God” applied to any person other than the
saints. It is never applied to the world at large, where the reprobate would be
included. On the latter the “wrath of God” abides, while on the former “there
is no condemnation.” Only the Elect are the specific objects of the love of
God.
Duane Edward Spencer
TULIP, The Five Points
of Calvinism in the Light of Scripture, Baker, 1979, p. 41.
Is it a small
thing in your eyes to be loved by God – to be the son, the spouse, the love,
the delight of the King of glory? Christian, believe this, and think about it:
you will be eternally embraced in the arms of the love which was from
everlasting, and will extend to everlasting – of the love which brought the Son
of God's love from heaven to earth, from earth to the cross, from the cross to
the grave, from the grave to glory – that love which was weary, hungry,
tempted, scorned, scourged, buffeted, spat upon, crucified, pierced – which
fasted, prayed, taught, healed, wept, sweated, bled, died. That love will
eternally embrace you.
Richard Baxter
The love of
God can be a profound answer to just about any human struggle, but sometimes we
can use it in such a way that it becomes a watered down version of profoundly
rich truth. For example, sometimes, because of shortcomings in us rather than
Scripture, this answer misses the call to “consider others better than
yourselves” (Phil. 2:3), or it ignores personal repentance. Sometimes it still
allows us and our needs to be at the center of the world, and God becomes our
psychic errand boy given the task of inflating our self-esteem.
Edward T. Welch
When People are Big and God is Small, P&R
Publishing, 1997, p. 18. Used by Permission.
We think it
safer and more effective to look to other people to relieve our emptiness. In
some cases, when love is sweet, we might even feel that we have found it.
Sadly, this feeling misleads us. It reinforces our sinful idea that people
might be the answer to our need, so we pursue them with an obsession. The love
that we desire, however, can only be found in the living God.
Edward T. Welch
When People are Big and God is Small, P&R
Publishing, 1997, p. 172. Used by Permission.
In Himself, God
is love; through Him, love is manifested, and by Him, love is defined.
Burk Parsons
Love
is in the Air, Tabletalk Magazine, May 2004, p. 6. Used by Permission.
If we want
proof of God’s love for us, then we must look first at the Cross where God
offered up His Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Calvary is the one objective,
absolute, irrefutable proof of God’s love for us.
Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, 1988, p. 138.
Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com, All rights
reserved.
The extent of
God’s love at Calvary is seen in both the infinite cost to Him of giving His
one and only Son, and in the wretched and miserable condition of those He loved.
God could not remove our sins without an infinite cost to both Himself and His
Son. And because of their great love for us, both were willing – yes more than
merely willing – to pay that great cost, the Father in giving His one and only
Son, and the Son in laying down His life for us. One of the essential
characteristics of love is the element of self-sacrifice, and this was
demonstrated for us to its ultimate in God’s love at Calvary.
Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, 1988, p. 138.
Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
The great God
not only loves His saints, but He loves to love them.
Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, 1988, p. 142.
Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
We mistakenly
look for tokens of God’s love in happiness. We should instead look for them in His
faithful and persistent work to conform us to Christ.
Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, 1988, p. 150.
Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
God’s
unfailing love for us is an objective fact affirmed over and over in the
Scriptures. It is true whether we believe it or not. Our doubts do not destroy
God’s love, nor does our faith create it. It originates in the very nature of
God, who is love, and it flows to us through our union with His beloved Son.
Jerry Bridges
Trusting God, 1988, p. 155.
Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com,
All rights reserved.
Moreover, the
topic of election is nearly always introduced for a practical purpose, in order
to foster assurance (not presumption), holiness (not moral apathy). humility (not pride) and witness (not lazy selfishness)...
Similarly in 1 Thessalonians 1:4 Paul unites the love of God and the election
of God. That is, He chose us because He loves us, and He love
us because He loves us. He does not love us because we are lovable, but only
because He is love. And with that mystery we must be content.
John Stott
Down through
the years God’s love has shined through misery, tears, and sin like a shaft of
sunlight on a dark day. We see God’s love in His revelation, in His mercy, in
His patience, and in His redemption. We see the love of God as the infinite One
becomes an infant in Bethlehem’s manger. We see it in His life and ministry.
And most of all we see it as He hangs on the cross, dying for our sins.
George Sweeting
Who Said That? Moody, 1994, p. 211.
Let us but feel that He has His heart set
upon us, that He is watching us from those heavens with tender interest, that
He is following us day by day as a mother follows her babe in his first attempt
to walk alone, that He has set His love upon us, and in spite of ourselves is
working out for us His higher will and blessing, as far as we will let Him – and
then nothing can discourage us.
A.B.
Simpson
He spared not
his own Son, but delivered him up for us all; how shall He not with him freely
give us all things" (Romans 8:32)? How is it imaginable that God should
withhold, after this, spirituals or temporals, from
His people? How shall He not call them effectually, justify them freely,
sanctify them thoroughly, and glorify them eternally? How shall He not clothe
them, feed them, protect and deliver them? Surely if He would not spare this
own Son one stroke, one tear, one groan, one sigh, one circumstance of misery,
it can never be imagined that ever He should, after this, deny or withhold from
His people, for whose sakes all this was suffered, any mercies, any comforts,
any privilege, spiritual or temporal, which is good for them.
John Flavel
How you view
God determines the quality and style of your Christian experience. Many
Christians spend much of their lives paralyzed because, although they have
trusted Christ as Saviour, they have never really seen what His sacrifice
teaches us about the character of God. He gave His Son; He sent His Son; He
“handed over” His Son because He loves us.
Sinclair Ferguson
A Heart for God, 1987, p. 70, by permission
Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA.
He does not
love us if we love Him. He loves us with an unconditional love; therefore,
we should love Him. The message of the covenant is one of God’s totally free grace to His people. Of course, it calls for a response of
total commitment. But notice the order: God’s covenant love is not the result
of our commitment; it is the cause of it. The pattern is, “I will, therefore
you should;” not “I will, but only if you will first.”
Sinclair Ferguson
A Heart for God, 1987, p. 36-37, by
permission Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA.
If we have
deep-seated fears that God does not really love us (as many Christians have),
we can only go so far in growing nearer to God. There will come a point at
which we will fear to trust Him any further because we cannot be sure of His
love. When we look at ourselves, or our own faith, or our circumstances we will
never be free from those lurking fears. Satan will see to that. But when we lift up our eyes and look on the
cross we find the final persuasion that God is gracious towards us. How can he
be against us when all His wrath against us fell upon
Christ? How can He fail to care for us when He gave the only Son He had for our
sake? How can we doubt Him when He has given us evidence of His love sufficient
to banish all doubts?
Sinclair B. Ferguson
Grow in Grace, by permission of Banner of
Truth, Carlisle, PA. 1989, p. 59.
God’s love is
the most awesome thing about Him. It is not His justice, nor His majesty, nor
even His blazing holiness, but the fact that He has made and keeps a covenant
of personal commitment and love to His people.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
Grow in Grace, by permission of Banner of
Truth, Carlisle, PA. 1989, p. 107-108.
Who can add
to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world. The perfect
gift is that He gave His only Son. The only requirement is to believe in Him.
The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life.
Corrie ten Boom
John's point
in 1 John 4, "God is love," is that those who really do know God come
to love that way too. Doubtless we do not do it very well, but aren't Christians
supposed to love the unlovable-even our enemies? Because the Gospel has
transformed us, our love is to be self-originating, not elicited by the
loveliness of the loved. For that is the way it is with God.
He loves because love is one of His perfections, in perfect harmony with all
His other perfections.
D.A. Carson
The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God,
Crossway, 2000, p. 63.
Wrath, unlike
love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function
of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but
there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His
image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the
jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of
diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness.
D.A. Carson
The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God,
Crossway, 2000, p. 67.
The cliché,
God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be
abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God
hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so
forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and
on the sinner (John 3:36).
D.A. Carson
The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God,
Crossway, 2000, p. 70.
Both God's
love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the
new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through
redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the
cross.
D.A. Carson
The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God,
Crossway, 2000, p. 70.
God’s love to
His elect is not of yesterday; it does not begin with their love to Him, we
love Him, because He first loved us. It was bore in His heart toward them long
before they were delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the
kingdom of His dear Son. It does not commence in time, but bears date from
eternity, and is the ground and foundation of the elect’s being called in time
out of darkness into marvelous light: I have loved thee, says the Lord to the
church, with an everlasting love.
John Gill
Jesus did not
come to make God’s love possible, but to make God’s love visible.
Author Unknown
God loves us
not because of who we are, but because of who He is.
Author Unknown
We
must learn to see our circumstances through God’s love, and not God’s love
through our circumstances.
Author
Unknown
The kind of
love that animates the inclusivist god is more akin to sentimentalism than
God's holy affection. If love means God abandons all of His other attributes,
then love itself is deified. The love of God does not dictate that He abandon
His justice or holiness. In fact, the glory of the gospel is that God is both
just and justifier of the ungodly. God does not allow unregenerate sinners to
do as they will, worship what they wish, live as they please,
and still go free. In the divine scheme of things, sin demands punishment. The
rebellion of self-worship requires wrath. Yet, the God of wrath is no less than
the God of mercy. He is the same God. Were God never to have offered salvation
to any sinner, His love would still survive unblemished. The reality and riches
of God's love is not measured in the number of person's
saved, but in the magnificence of the attribute itself.
C. Ben Mitchell
Who Will Be Saved? Edited
by: House, Paul and Thornbury, Gregory. Crossway, 2000, p. 158.
The Cross is
the ultimate evidence that there is no length the love of God will refuse to go
in effecting reconciliation.
Kent Hughes
Nothing binds
me to my Lord like a strong belief in His changeless love.
Measure not
God’s love and favour by your own feeling. The sun
shines as clearly in the darkest day as it does in the brightest. The
difference is not in the sun, but in some clouds which hinder the manifestation
of the light thereof.
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 89.
The only
ground of God’s love is His love. The ground of God’s love is only and wholly
in Himself. There is neither portion nor proportion in us to draw His love.
There is no love nor loveliness in us that should
cause a bean of His love to shine upon us.
A Puritan Golden Treasury,
compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 122.
The words
“God is love” have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons.
Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single
person then before the world was made, He was not love.
Beyond Personality, Macmillan, 1948,
p. 21.
In some way,
it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and
less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
C.S. Lewis
The pure,
mere love of God is that alone from which sinners are justly to expect that no
sin will pass unpunished, but that His love will visit them with every calamity
and distress that can help to break and purify the bestial heart of man and
awaken in him true repentance and conversion to God. It is love alone in the
holy Deity that will allow no peace to the wicked, nor ever cease its judgments
till every sinner is forced to confess that it is good for him that he has been
in trouble, and thankfully own that not the wrath but the love of God has
plucked out that right eye, cut off that right band, which he ought to have
done but would not do for himself and his own salvation.
The Spirit of Love.
God requires
satisfaction because He is holiness, but He makes satisfaction because He is
love.
My
brethren, when God first began to love you, He gave you all that He ever meant
to give you in the lump, and eternity of time is that in which He is retailing
of it out.
Jesus’ coming
is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.
God really
loves us and wants us to turn away from our sins. If He passed final judgment
now, we would have no such opportunity; that would be the end of time for us.
He has sufficient provocation to do so; that we recognize. We have sinned
enough to deserve His infinite wrath at any moment, but we do not receive it.
We have an opportunity, therefore, to turn away from our sin and to turn to
God. Instead of continuing to offend Him, we can plead for forgiveness and seek
to please Him. While there is yet life, that is possible.
John Gerstner
The Problem of Pleasure, Soli Deo Gloria,
2002, p. 20.
God loves
each one of us as if there were only one of us to love.
Augustine
To announce
to people indiscriminately that God loves them “unconditionally” (without
carefully distinguishing among the distinctive types of divine love) is to
promote a perilous false sense of security in the hearers.
R.C. Sproul
Abundant
Love, Tabletalk Magazine, May 2004, p. 7. Used by Permission.
Is it a small
thing in your eyes to be loved by God – to be the son, the spouse, the love,
the delight of the King of glory? Christian, believe this, and think about it:
you will be eternally embraced in the arms of the love which was from
everlasting, and will extend to everlasting – of the love which brought the Son
of God’s love from heaven to earth, from earth to the cross, from the cross to
the grave, from the grave to glory – that love which was weary, hungry,
tempted, scorned, scourged, buffeted, spat upon, crucified, pierced – which
fasted, prayed, taught, healed, wept, sweated, bled, died. That love will eternally embrace you.
Now, how
would a God like this go about loving us? Would it not be by providing us with
the highest good possible? And is not God Himself the highest good? Therefore,
if God really loves us, He must work to bring us into the enjoyment of who He
is (there’s our happiness) and thereby win from our hearts praise for Himself
(there’s His glory). He must do everything in His infinite power to lead us
into praise and honor of His name. By winning for Himself our worship as the
God of all glory, we experience the greatest possible satisfaction, namely,
enjoying God. There’s our happiness again. And God is most glorified by our
enjoyment of Him. Or, to put it in words we already heard, God is most
glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
Sam Storms
Copied
from: Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Knowing God by Sam Storms,
© 2000, p. 100. Used by permission of NavPress – www.navpress.org. All rights
reserved.
Here we
commemorate the greatest and deepest demonstration of true love the
world has ever known. For God looked down upon sorrowing, struggling, sinning
humanity and was moved with compassion for the contrary, sheep-like creatures
He had made. In spite of the tremendous personal cost it would entail to
Himself to deliver them from their dilemma He chose deliberately to descend and
live amongst them that He might deliver them. This meant laying aside His
splendor, His position, His prerogatives as the
perfect and faultless One. He knew He would be exposed to terrible privation,
to ridicule, to false accusations, to rumor, gossip and malicious charges that
branded Him as a glutton, drunkard, friend of sinners and even an
imposter. It entailed losing His reputation.
It would involve physical suffering, mental anguish and spiritual agony. In
short, His coming to earth as the Christ, as Jesus of Nazareth, was a
straightforward case of utter self-sacrifice that culminated in the cross of
Calvary. The laid-down life, the poured-out blood were the supreme symbols of
total selflessness. This was love. This was God. This was divinity in action,
delivering men from their own utter selfishness, their own stupidity, their own suicidal instincts as lost sheep unable to help
themselves.
Phillip Keller
A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, Permission by
Zondervan, www.zondervan.com, 1970, p.
107-108.