We Love God!

God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)

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

Do you know why the promotion of self-love is not stated in the Bible? Because it’s not wholesome and because we already do it! Look at verse 29 of Ephesians 5. “For no one ever hated his own flesh.” There you go, right from the Bible. “No one ever hated his own flesh.” We all already love ourselves. We, verse 29, “nourish and cherish” our bodies. We all think of ourselves more that we think of others. We all pursue what’s in our best interest, even if it means, the crazy belief that we’ll be happier if we take our own lives to the pain of all those who love us.
Randy Smith