Meet the Worlds Greatest Lover
You Are Loved
Several years ago, I read a survey taken in one of our national prisons by psychologists of prisoners in an attempt to determine why they had turned to crime.
The overwhelming majority said that they felt unloved by their families and friends.
Perhaps you have, at times, felt unloved and feeling unloved, you had no reason or motivation to live right.
The old cliché is, since no one cares about what I do, why should I care?:
But, someone does care!
The greatest realization of self-worth is to know that God loves and cares for you.
God's love includes all people, regardless of circumstances, social status, or race.
In John 3:16, Jesus said, God so loved the world, (this includes you), that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
God's love for you is unconditional, there is nothing that you can do that will keep Him from loving you. By nature, God is love , and He loves you in spite of your failures and sins. He will lovingly forgive you of all your sins. In
1st John, 1:9, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of all our sins and to cleanse us from all our unrighteousness.
God's love is uncondemning.
God's love for us does not condone or excuse our sins and failures. Yet He does not condemn us.
Jesus said in, John 3:17, God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved.
He does not ignore your sin as if it were nothing but He sees it like a deep scratch on the paint of your new car. You dont think the car is worthless but you hate the scratch.
God's love for you is eternal and everlasting because God Himself is eternal. His love knows no bounds or limits.
You can of a truth say, I am loved. Someone Important cares for me. What happens to me and what I do matters to my Heavenly Father.
To God, You Are Very Special
Facts Showing God Loves you in a Powerful way
1. God’s Son Jesus died for you.
God demonstrated His love for you in this that He laid down His life for you.
2. Nothing can separate you from His love. His love does not run! (Romans 8:35-39).
3. God loves us even though He has seen us at our worse!
While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. God knows our hearts our thoughts and our secret sins. He loves us with an endless love and yet He hates those sins.
God hates sins because He loves us and sin destroys lives.
Finding the One who will make life complete.
Everyone needs someone who loves them. That search for love has often driven them to do very foolish things. To accept abusive relationships, to compromise their morals to find acceptance.
You can finding the perfect partner! The perfect companion! The Perfect Lover!
Many of the most popular people in the world have not found love that lasts. The voyeuristic news media tells the latest breakups of the Hollywood pretty people.
For you, however, it can be different. The perfect person is down on His knees proposing to you. He wants to give you His heart and wants you to be His forever.
People without God have tried to fill an emptiness with fame fortune and relationships but the emptiness in the heart of a person without God is a hole that not even a hundred lovers could fill.
Yet still there is hope. Your dream can come true. Prince Charming is at your door.
Rev. 3:20 Look, I stand at the door of your heart and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door to me, I will come into your life and become your partner for life.
Being in love is risky. Beauty fades. People change. At any moment we could lose the one we love through death. The greater our love the greater the pain we are in danger of suffering.
All marriages end either in an angry divorce or mourning at a grave. Love seems to carry the seeds of the deepest pain we can have in life. Is there a love that is more powerful than death? A love that satisfies forever.. A love that does not end?
You ache for someone you:
* will forever be proud of
* can trust completely
* can be totally open with
* who always and fully understands you
Your secret desire is for someone:
* whose mind, strength and beauty will never decline
You need someone who:
* meets your needs so exactly that it seems you were made for each other
* not just feels your pain but can always help you no matter how serious your needs become
* knows your darkest secret, your every thought, and yet thinks highly of you
* can always be with you, no matter where you are.
* will forever love you with a love so great and that it always thrills and satisfies you
* always brings the best out of you, enabling you to reach the highest of which you are capable.
Finally, as impossible as it seems, you want to be free from the constant fear of losing the person who means the most to you. You need a lover who could never be hit by sickness or injury or death.
Marriage is Union of Two Lives
True marriage is believing in someone so completely that you give all that you are, and all that you have, to that person for life.
For marriage to work, both partners must give themselves to the other.
If a poor girl married a millionaire boy, she would get his riches and he would get her debts. He would take on her shame and she would gain his honor. For this to happen, she must turn from other men and join herself and her few possessions to this man in marriage. Everything he owns would become hers, if she lets everything of hers become his.
Similarly, if we give to God everything we have – our time, abilities, friendships, and everything we own – he will flood us with a generosity that only God can show.
We hand over to Jesus the shameful things we have done. That’s what killed him. In return, Jesus’ sinless perfection becomes ours, so that we can enjoy the closest friendship with the Holy God.
By becoming one with God, we give God the right to do whatever he likes with everything we own and the Owner of the universe makes his riches available to us. We trade our abilities, for his unlimited power; our attempts to run our lives, for his unlimited wisdom. We give him our time on earth and he gives us eternity.
In every way you gain from God’s offer and he loses. But God is in love with you. He wants this holy union more than you can imagine. Do not make him sad by holding back.
A marriage made in heaven!
The following is like a wedding in which you give yourself to the Lord, and so make him your God. In turn, the King of kings makes you worthy to become spiritually one with him, and He promises to give Himself completely to you.
If the following describes your feelings, you can make it your prayer by reading it to God.
Dear God, I want you.
I know you have been knocking on the door of my life for some time and I am
sorry I have not opened the door until now.
God its a mess in here.
My home is out of order.
But I know you love me enough that you will come in and help me clean it up.
Father from this point on we are in this together.
You have joined your life to mine. I have joined my life to yours.
Thank you Lord for dying on the cross to pay for the mess I have made, and thank you for coming in to enable me to make a life that will glorify you.
I thank you that I am now entering into a friendship with you that is so close and so powerful that not even death can break it.
The Lord of heaven and earth knows your secret thoughts.
If you prayed the full prayer honestly, you have entered a new spiritual world. That’s hard to believe. Everything seems the same. But not from heaven’s view. Your life-changing ‘marriage’ has begun.
The proof lies not in your feelings (such as whether you feel guilty or happy), but in the honesty of the Holy God. He has given his word (in the Bible) that whoever turns from sin and looks to Jesus to be made clean, has a totally new future. God is no liar!
If this is the first time you have sincerely offered such a prayer, you need further support immediately.
Romans 5:8 Christ died for us while we were still sinners. This demonstrates God's love for us.
Ephes. 2:4-5 But God is rich in mercy because of his great love for us.
Romans 5:5 We're not ashamed to have this confidence, because God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
Romans 8:31-35 What can we say about all of this? If God is for us, who can be against us?
1 John 4:9-10 God has shown us his love by sending his only Son into the world so that we could have life through him. 10] This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the payment for our sins.
1 John 4:16 We have known and believed that God loves us. God is love. Those who live in God's love live in God, and God lives in them.
The perfect partner
In old-fashioned romance, young lovers would let go of reality and let their dreams run wild. Not surprisingly, though they were often not religious people, they found themselves using religious words to describe their hopes and feelings:
* She idolizes him
* He adores her (adore is another word for worship)
* You’re divine
* He’s heavenly
* He worships the ground she walks on
* A marriage made in heaven
As these people discovered, hidden below the surface of our mind is the awareness that in God is the greatest love.
The ache deep within you will remain until you enjoy a thrilling and fulfilling oneness with the One who made you. God is the perfect partner you yearn for. Yet his very perfection makes him unapproachable. The Almighty is frighteningly pure, totally good, completely without fault. We are not. God is so perfect, he is like blinding light. We are like darkness compared to him. And darkness is destroyed in the presence of light.
Back to reality We come crashing back to reality. There is an answer, but to appreciate how wonderful the answer is, we must consider the size of the problem. Facing the problem is so unpleasant that we want to block it out, like people in a dark prison suddenly seeing bright sunlight. Yet facing truth will free you like nothing else can.
If we went into a hospital and met a doctor sterilized for surgery, he could not touch us. We may seem clean, but not by the standards he must keep. We are like that in the presence of the holy Lord. We may be as good as the next person, but by the unreachable perfection of his standards we are moral lepers – spiritually diseased. God must keep his distance.
(Don’t worry! This story has a happy ending! There are rich rewards for those with the courage to face facts we inwardly know to be true. God can make us more beautiful than we dare dream. So we have no need to act like burn patients smashing mirrors.)
Becoming beautiful Should we change and never so much as think another wrong thought, it wouldn’t help. If having sex made you sick with AIDS, deciding to never again have sex will not heal you. Having sin in our past is like having AIDS in our blood. No-one can change the past.
Some things would be wrong for God to do. Consider a man in court found guilty of dangerous driving. The judge happens to be his close friend. Would it be right for the judge to say his guilty friend is innocent? Or could he fine the offender less because he is his friend? Only a worthless judge could permit law-breaking or show favoritism.
And God is our Judge, because there is no such freak as a self-made person. None of us decided to be born, or can even design our children’s fingerprints. God made the brains we think with. The Lord is maker – and therefore owner – of everything we have ever used or abused. We owe him everything. Like it or not, that means we must answer to God for our every action. Our selfishness has hurt people. It would be an outrage for the Supreme Judge to ignore our wrongdoing. We’re the ones who bellow at God when we see other people do wrong and go unpunished. So although God loves you more than words can describe, he must declare you guilty. And justice demands the penalty be paid.
That leaves just two alternatives. Either you pay the penalty, or someone pays it for you.
It would be folly for me to consider taking your punishment. I have my own wickedness to answer for. But the Son of God, two thousand years ago, left his heavenly judgment seat and came to earth. He became the only human who has lived a perfect life. In the brightness of his purity, our best attempts at doing good look like mud. So when Christ willingly suffered the pain and shame of a criminal’s death, something of earth-shaking importance was happening. The innocent Son of God was taking upon himself full blame for your sin.
Physical torment was almost swallowed by spiritual agony. On the cross the only person who has enjoyed eternal oneness with God cried, ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’ Father God had to desert his beloved Son, treating him as the worst person on earth, until the horrific penalty was paid in full. After suffering the full penalty of our wickedness, Christ broke through to life again, blasting a path for us to follow.
You are the focus of this heart-stopping display of love, the greatest love the universe has known.
Will you continue to reject it?
Enjoy the greatest love affair!
By dying in our place Jesus has made it legal for anyone, though guilty, to go completely free. But there is something you must do before you can walk free.
Accept His proposal of marriage. To be united with the Lord of the universe; to have God’s power flowing through you; to reach the heights you were made for, requires a response from you.
To explain, let’s return to the dangerous driver. A judge would have to fine his friend for breaking the law. It is quite legal, however, to offer a friend money to pay the fine. It is then up to the offender whether he accepts the judge’s gift. It would break Jesus’ heart if you ignore his offer to suffer for you. That means you must pay the penalty yourself. That’s the last thing he wants. God is anxious to save you from the horrors of hell and give you a fulfilling, life-changing partnership with him. But you must accept the gift. That involves admitting that you need the gift – that only Jesus’ sacrifice can remove your guilt.
There is one more consideration. What if the dangerous driver has no regrets? If he plans to continue breaking road rules, he is a danger to others. It would be wrong to let him go free.
Similarly, it would be wrong for God to forgive us until our attitude to sin has changed. I tremble at the thought of the countless thousands of people who have tragically missed this point.
Salvation from our sins means we no longer have anything to do with those sins. We are not only Justified but also sanctified. Not only saved from the penalty of that sin but also the power of that sin is broken.
Some people think that Gods forgiveness is a permit to sin. But God will never forgive sin that you intend to continue.
God honors us by respecting our wishes. If we don’t want him to be our God – letting him be in total control of our lives – it saddens and horrifies him, but in his gentleness he will let us go our own way. No one has suffered the pain of rejected love like God.
You can never be forced to love someone. Nor can you be forced to desire purity of heart.
The Giver has done all he can. It’s over to you.
To ignore our Creator is the height of selfishness. He is the Source of every good thing we ever enjoyed. (Even sin’s fizzle of pleasure, that slippery shadow of the real thing grabbed while opposing him, is possible only because of our God-given ability to experience pleasure.)
Every wonderful thing we take for granted comes from him. He even holds our atoms together. He looks after even those who ignore him, giving them time after time to respond to his astounding love. They don’t want God to interfere, but he does anyhow – showering them with a thousand soft, warm, beautiful, delicious, refreshing, thrilling and uplifting gifts. At death, however, those who on earth wanted to be free from God are finally given their wish.
That’s the final horror. To be cut off forever from the Source of all love, beauty, fulfillment and joy is something too terrifying to think about. If you want to be finished with ungodly ‘pleasures’, however, and you rely on the fact that Jesus died for your sins, you allow God to do what he longs to do – pay your debt to justice and credit to your account the moral perfection of Christ. That makes you so pure in God’s eyes that you need no longer be kept out of his presence. You can then begin an endless friendship with the most wonderful Person in the universe. Would now like to pray to give your life to God? Yes Do you feel it is too soon to give your life to God?