Equip 2024: Our Blessed and Boundless God #8 - He Who is Love: Divine Love | Steve Meister

Well, thank you so much for your kind hospitality this weekend, and it's been wonderful to be here and thankful to minister to God's Word to you, and it's funny all the different connections. The world is small, the church is smaller, and even with Kofi and I, I went to seminary with his pastor in London, and we have lots of some of his friends from the UK are members of my church, so there's lots of fun cross lines and things.

So it's been great to see you in your natural habitat here in Oregon and to minister to.

You.

Malachi and the Question of God’s Love

And we want to do, as our brother said, cap off the weekend thinking about God and talking about the love of God, and if you would turn your copy of God's Word with me to the prophet Malachi chapter 1, you will find Malachi in that part of the Bible where all the pages are stuck together, otherwise known as the Minor Prophets, and it is the very end, so if you go to the Gospel of Matthew and turn left, you will run into Malachi.

We want to look at chapter 1, verses 1 to 5, and use this as a reflection of thinking about God's love, and particularly when we doubt the love of God as Israel did here, and what it means to know the eternal love of our glorious God.

So let me read for us Malachi chapter 1, beginning in verse 1 through verse 5. And there it is written, The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. I have loved you, says the Lord, but you say, how have you loved us?

Is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste to his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert. If Edom says we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins, the Lord of hosts says they may rebuild, but I will tear down, and they shall be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.

Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel. This is the word of the Lord. Let me pray for us. Our Father in heaven, we ask that by your grace and the illuminating power of your spirit, you would be with both preacher and hearer.

We might behold your glory in the face of Jesus, even promised here by the prophet, whose your spirit carried along to point us to the Savior. We ask you would help us do this in Jesus name.

Amen.

Doubting God’s Love in Israel’s Post-Exilic Crisis

Well, I'm sure we would all agree we're very practiced at blaming others for what we have done. It's a very old habit. It goes back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. After they rebelled, you remember it was Adam who said to God, the woman you put here is to blame.

And then Eve excused herself and said, the serpent deceived me. So Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed God. Eve blamed the serpent, which God permitted. In his lectures on Genesis, the reformer Martin Luther observed, humanity's excuse for sin is Lord, actually you sin.

And that's what we do. Now, none of us would say such a thing out loud, of course. But if we're honest, often beneath our discouragements, our bitterness, our cynicism is a controversy with God. Because when our circumstances exasperate us, who ordained them?

And when our hopes are dashed, whose promises built up our expectations? So where do we go when we doubt the love of God? We go, of course, to the only one who can resolve it, God. And in Malachi, God comes in essence to debate and to resolve his people's doubts about him.

Malachi is the last of the Old Testament prophets, as he is here at the end of the Old Testament. And he's unique among them because if you're familiar with Malachi's prophecy, it's not full of visions.

It's not full of elaborate theatrics like other prophets. It's basically arguments. Malachi is organized around six arguments between God and Israel. In essence, God is engaging the boiling controversies in the hearts of his people.

And this is happening during what we call Israel's post-exilic period. And that just means it's the final act of the Old Testament before the coming of Christ. If you're familiar with the narrative of Ezra and Nehemiah, that's what's going on here.

And Malachi was a contemporary with prophets like Haggai and Zechariah. This is after Israel was exiled to Babylon. And they've returned to the land under the Persians by permission of Cyrus. And here's the thing, though.

Israel's back in the land physically, but they're still slaves. In fact, at significant points in both Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9, they confess that very thing. We're still slaves. We're not out of our bondage.

We're still under Persian dominion. They're still suffering slander and even violence from their own community. What's going on here in the background of Malachi's ministry is God's people are being persecuted by government officials.

They're being betrayed by apostates in the temple and among the priesthood. They have bad crops. There's economic downturn. Haggai talks about inflation. And Haggai 2, stop me if all this seems irrelevant.

All right, they're dealing with all of these issues. And life was frankly, it was disappointing. And to make matters worse, God's prophets had promised that the nations would be shook, that Jerusalem would be a mountain to which they'd stream and seek the Lord.

But the temple had at this point been rebuilt for decades, and no one is streaming to it. In fact, most of Israel is rather disdainful.

And even apathetic to worship.

And so the question we see in verse 2 is the tone on social media in Malachi's day. How have you loved us? Really? God loves us? Look around. Yeah, right. And so God sent Malachi, as one writer put it, to fasten their minds on theology.

You see, how we understand the varied and trying circumstances of life depends entirely on who we first understand God to be. And do we understand God by how we see our circumstances? Or do we look at our circumstances through whom we understand God to be?

This is the question that Malachi is pressing. And the Holy Spirit here reorients us to the unfailing love of God as the lens through which to view life. We view life through the lens of God's eternal unfailing love.

And I want to make three main observations about God's love from this passage. That God's love is unprovoked, unmerited, and undeniable. God's unfailing love is unprovoked, unmerited, and undeniable. And we'll spend the majority of our time on that first observation.

That's the most provocative, if you will. God's love is unprovoked. To His doubting people, God says simply here in verse 2, I have loved you. That is, I have and I am still loving you. And He says this, says the Lord, Yahweh, God's name.

And if you were with us on Saturday, you remember yesterday that God's name reminds us He is who He is. That's His essential name. The word translated Lord here, whether Yahweh or an older translation Jehovah, means the I am, the one who is, God who is here.

And as the God who is, that means we have to think very carefully about what it means for Him to say, I love you. Now that may sound absurd to most people, isn't God's love self-evident? In fact, if people know anything about Christianity, it's that God loves.

However, we all know that a term like love is nearly meaningless apart from the relationship it's used in. So I love my wife. I love my children. I love my church. I love California. I love Double Double's protein style with grilled onions and mustard instead of this bread.

And I will use love in all of those statements. And you and I know intuitively, you know, I do not mean the same thing by my use of love. In fact, what we'd say if we were going to put it more philosophically, that the nature of love is defined by the nature of the lover and the nature of the beloved.

It means everything. The difference between if I say, I love my wife and I love a Double Double. And you know, the nature of the Double Double and the nature of a human wife dictates the meaning of what I mean by love.

We also know that confusion about love is deeper for our culture today than maybe it has been at least in recent human history. Because our culture seems to want to understand love as uncritical affirmation, to accept without qualification.

It's a sentiment or sympathy. And it's presented today as almost a truism. Love is love. As though love is the most basic fact of reality that cannot be questioned or even considered. And it must be understood and not defined by any other point of reference or any other person.

So this is no wonder there's some difficulties when we think about God's love. We have all this swirling around us. So when the Lord here, the Great I Am, declares his love, it must be consistent with his nature as the lover.

This is why some of the doctrines we looked at, the attributes of God, matter. Things like God's simplicity. We looked at that yesterday and it simply means, pardon the pun, that God is uncomposed. He's without parts or principles.

God is not made up of anything before him. All things come from him. Nothing makes up God. No one one day put a bunch of principles in the celestial soup and cooked up God. So love is not a thing of which God is made up of.

Love is not more basic than God. I mean, the basic idea of being God is nothing is more basic than him.

He's first.

That's what it means to be God. And so that means love is not something God has that he can lose or that can be diminished or raised like it can with us. I can be unloving and I'm still me. God's not something.

Love is not something God has. In fact, scripture says we know God is love. It identifies him. Our Dutch friend Wilhelmus Abrakel said, the love of God is by definition, the loving God himself. The love of God is God.

It's him. So that means that God's love is of an infinite distinction between what we understand in human relations as love. And we could point out that distinction to this basic difference. We love in response to what we find lovable.

Love is drawn out from us. It's provoked from us. Love is we are made to love something by its loveliness. And then we seek to gain our beloved. I will reschedule a meeting and relocate myself to gain a double-double from in and outs.

It's drawn out of me and I seek it. It took me over a year to get my wife to lower her standards and agree to marry me, right? Her loveliness drawed out my pursuit of her to gain her. But think about now about God.

We understand that about human love across its spectrum. But God, infinite, eternal, self-sufficient, self-existent. Does God need anything? Is there anything greater than him that would draw out his affections that he would desire that thing?

No.

Bible says who is given to God that he might be repaid?

No one.

So the God from whom and for whom and to whom are all things, he must not love in response to gain what he lacks. So it must mean God's love is a will to give what is good to those he's chosen to love.

God's love, you see, is a sovereign and a free act for the good of his beloved. And it's unprovoked by his beloved. Now, this makes sense not only of God who is love, but it also makes sense of us as his beloved.

What distinguishes us? What would make us lovely in the eyes of God that he would look to us and say, well, obviously the God who is infinitely blessed loves me.

Just look at me, right?

And this is what Moses earlier explained to Israel about how God loved them. In Deuteronomy 7 verses 7 and 8, we read this. Moses explained to Israel and he says, it was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you.

For you were the fewest of all peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers. Did you catch what Moses said? He said, God set his love on you and chose you.

So love is parallel to choice. Hang on to that. And also God set his love on you and Moses goes on because he loves you. Wait a minute, time out Moses. Why does God love us? Because he loves you.

Exactly.

And that's as far as you will penetrate into the incomprehensible being of God. God loves you because he loves you. Quit asking questions beyond your ability to comprehend.

He loves you.

That's as far as you can go. God loves by choosing to set his love upon his people. And that fact of unprovoked love is the reality by which God's people need to interpret their reality. And that is what should have come to mind in verse 2 when God said, I've loved you.

Unprovoked. I've loved you. I set my love on you. But how did their spiritual apathy reply? Basically, oh yeah, prove it. Have you loved us? Life is hard. It's difficult. We're not having a good time.

Prove your love. In what ways do we see your love? You see their unmet expectations and their disappointments. They became the reasons to discount God's love for them. And of course, there's no sense of moral culpability or responsibility being taken here for their own situation.

So what God does then in the rest of this paragraph is he returns to some basic facts, some fundamental truths about sovereign grace and his covenantal love. You have been going through Genesis, I hear.

So you're familiar with these two twins by this point, Esau and Jacob. They were Isaac's twin sons. Isaac was the son of Abraham, the one through whom God was promised to bless the entire world. Esau, who is named first because he was the first born, and he ought to have inherited the birthright and the blessing.

But before they were born, God told Rebekah their mother in Genesis 25, the older shall serve the younger. That is God set his love upon Jacob, Israel, and passed over Esau, or as he says here, hated Esau.

Now, don't misunderstand the hate language here. This is not God expressing sinful malice or animosity. Love and hate were in the ancient Near East were covenantal terms. And in the Hebrew idiom, they refer to a choice.

You choose what you love, you reject what you hate. So remember what we just heard in Deuteronomy 7, God set his love on you and chose you. Love was to choose. And Jesus, likewise, in Luke 14, verse 26 says, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

Now, Jesus is not calling us to sin and violate the fifth commandment and dishonor our parents. He's saying, if you have to choose between me and your family, you go with me and reject your family. So hate there refers to rejection, not sinful malice.

And so what is happening here is before Esau was even born, before he had done anything or was preferred by Isaac, God chose Jacob to be the line through which his covenantal promises would descend. Now, the Edomites were included in the promise of the new covenant, but not that promise.

So you see here what God's unpacking, what had God's people forgotten when they selfishly just asked God, how did you love us? They forgot they were God's people, that God had chosen them. God had set his covenant love on them.

And even though they had the same nearness to Abraham as Edom, Esau and Jacob, they were twin brothers, the same nearness God chose them unprovoked by anything in them. This is what God says.

I've loved you.

You were chosen, not the Edomites. And that ought to reframe everything. Now, most Christians are familiar with this language here in Malachi 1, not from here in Malachi, but because the apostle Paul picks up this very verse and he uses it in Romans 9 verse 13 to answer the question of the new covenant.

That is what he says there, that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls. It is God's love is the purpose of his sovereign will, unprovoked, unprompted by what we've done.

Now we all know, I'm sure, that sovereign election is a controversial doctrine, but every Christian needs to know it because it is the basis of our assurance of the love of God. What it means is that God saved us by his grace alone, and that none of our works prompted God to respond as though we deserve it.

And to reinforce that fact, God reveals that he chose us before creation itself. So in Ephesians 1, beginning in verse 4, the Bible says, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

Listen to this next sentence. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will. In love, he predestined. It's the same thing Moses said to Israel in Deuteronomy 7.

He set his love and chose you. In love, he predestined you. God loves us because he loves us. It's the purpose of his will. God loves us because he wanted to. That's the technical theological answer. Why does God love his people?

Because he wants to. Matthew Henry put it like this. God fetched the reason for it purely from himself.

He chose to.

God loves us because he loves us. Because he wants to. Now, many Christians will say that God chose us based on what he foresaw people would do. He chose those he saw who would choose him. But this overturns really all the language of the Bible.

It's not a helpful answer. God chose Jacob before he or Esau was born. Not because of works, even unforeseen works. And even the language of know, when God says he knows someone, it's in the sense of relational knowing.

Like Adam knew his wife. That wasn't just information. It's relation. To foreknow is to forelove. And if the creator of all things in all eternity foreknows, he doesn't passively recognize what he has no part in.

He knows what he's going to bring to pass by his own word of power as a creator. He's the one who brings the distinction into existence. But also the problem with this answer is that it neglects that, apart from God sovereignly loving us, none of us would ever choose to love him in response.

If you know anything about Jacob in Genesis, and you will begin to learn more if you haven't already, there's not a whole lot lovable about him. He was deceitful. He was conniving. He was a terrible father.

He ripped his family apart with favoritism and partiality. And who among us would stand up with any shred of honesty and say, well, obviously God chose me. He saw the stellar qualities that I would bring to the table as a member of his people.

No, we say with the Bible that if any virtue I have, I've only received it. What do I have? The Bible teaches us to ask that I've not received. That rhetorical answer to that rhetorical question is absolutely nothing.

Now, many folks remember Martin Luther, the reformer, for nailing his 95 theses on the castle church door of Wittenberg. But I actually think the most profound sentence that Martin Luther ever wrote was not in those theses.

It was actually in the Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 28. So if you remember that, you probably think, I was reading the Heidelberg Disputation yesterday. But in the Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 28, perhaps the most important sentence Martin Luther ever wrote down.

The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to him. The love of God does not find but creates what is pleasing to him. God's love never responds because there's nothing lovelier than God for him to respond to.

So God's love doesn't find loveliness like we do and draw out our love. God creates what is pleasing to him by his love. God's love gives what is good. God's love is creative. And without his creative love, what would ever come from us in faith and love in return to him?

Nothing.

God's love gives, it creates. As Augustine said, we love God through God. God gave us love to love him with. His spirit shed his love abroad in our hearts. Now, of course, as we talk about God's distinguishing, choosing love, it raises questions.

Is it fair that God doesn't choose everyone? Remember, we are all guilty before God and all deserve his justice. If some are shown undeserved favor and love while others receive the justice they deserve, God has been unjust to absolutely no one.

No one is judged because they're unloved. They're judged because they're guilty as sinners. But we also need to keep this doctrine in its proper parameters. The confession of my church was a historic reformed confession says that we should treat it as a high mystery to be handled with special prudence.

That is special care. It's for our assurance. It's for our humility. It's for our consolation. And so, friend, if you're here and you're not a Christian, or if you're talking about with this with your friends who are not Christians, what are you to gain and what are we to share with others about God's sovereign love?

There's at least two truths, two things. The first is that God's sovereign love means that love is real. Love is real. The materialist or the naturalist account of life denies what is self-evident, love.

Love is irrational in the evolutionary scheme of reality. In a world that's supposedly designed by the survival of the fittest, love is contrary to all theory of evolution and survival of the fittest.

If the God, though, from whom all things are is love, then what we all know intuitively, love is real. It's an actual virtue. And the existence of love is not a deception of human anatomy. It comes from God and is for God.

We were made to be lovers and beloved before our creator. But second, the important thing of God's sovereign love, it teaches us that none of us have any hope to generate love for God in and of ourselves.

None of us do. Scripture describes us as alienated and hostile by nature. We cannot meet the law of love that God has given in his word for his creatures. And yet, God is willing and able to create love in the lives of helpless sinners.

That is the wonderful good news of the sovereign love of God. God is able and willing to create the love that he calls us to in his sinful creatures. And if we turn to the Lord Jesus and believe upon him, all of the promises of God are ours in Christ.

God's love is created to make us in the beginning and recreate us in the new beginning in Christ, in the Lord Jesus. And if we're Christians, we remember we are not working our way into the love of God.

We have life because God is love. God's love creates it first. And none of us are discovering whether we're elect. Our call is to see our sin, to see the promises of God in Christ, and to trust Jesus.

This is the call of God to the world. Trust the Lord Jesus Christ. And dear Christian, God reveals his love to us, his sovereign love that we cannot peer in. He loves us because he loves us for our comfort and our assurance.

Our assurance before God is within God, immutable, infinite, and free. His love. And it's our hope. Gerhardus Voss, the biblical theologian of the early 20th century said this, the best proof that God will never cease to love us lies in the fact that he never began.

God's love is eternal. Eternal is not endless time. It's before time. You can think about this for a week, dear Christian, but God never began to love you. His love is eternal. And so that means his love will never end.

God's love for us has no beginning. It will have no end. The fact of his eternal love means it's immutable and it will never change. And it only must be then how he loves that his love in its form taken to us changes in its outworking and manifestations.

And that's what God tells Israel next. Not only is God's love unprovoked, it's unmerited. It's unmerited. And let's look at the verses three to four here. Esau demonstrated his godless nature, you remember, by despising his own birthright for a meal.

And his descendants, Edom, became one of Israel's fiercest opponents. We're told in the Old Testament that Edom rejoiced when Israel, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. But what stands out in this language here, laid waste, heritage to jackals, these statements about Edom, these are all familiar because they're taken from the prophets about Jerusalem's own judgment.

So just for one example, in Jeremiah 9, verse 11, we read, I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a lair of jackals, and I will make the cities of Judah laid waste, a desolation. In other words, Edom will receive the justice they deserve, just as Israel.

But there's a big difference. Verse four, it will be permanent. If Edom says, we will rebuild the ruins, God says on the assurance of the Lord who commands angels and armies, the Lords of hosts, he will tear it down and ensure they are a wicked country, subject to the Lord's anger forever.

See, the distinction the Lord is drawing out for Israel is that Edom and Israel were both guilty for idolatry and sin. Israel and Edom both came forth from one man through Abraham. Israel served other gods in Egypt and were exiled for their idolatry.

Both merited the judgment of God, Edom and Israel equally. But Edom received it while God's unmerited grace rescued Israel from judgment. And that has continued. One famed archaeologist wrote this, no ancient people except Israel has ever been restored to its native land after such a clean break.

Entire people groups vanish under the Babylonians and the Persians and others. I mean, how many Edomites have you ever run into? You met one? No, but Israel remained. And they were restored to their land just as God promised.

You see, these people who are complaining all around them were testimonies to faithfulness. They were still there. Entire people groups have vanished, but they were there. Now, was it the fullness of all that God had promised in his messianic promises?

No, but the temple was rebuilt, the priesthood was restored, a city was being walled by Nehemiah and so on during Malachi's day. Love, as we've said, is primarily defined by the relationship. If I say that Kofi sliced me open with a knife, you'd be alarmed if you thought your pastor had knifed someone.

But if my surgeon's name was Kofi, you'd see it as a good. He's relieving my illness, right? The action is always defined by the nature of the relationship and the one who's doing it. And the fact of God's covenant love for Israel means that things has changed, but that changed everything and how they view everything.

Israel here was not under angry judgment. They were not being cast off. They were under covenant discipline. The curses that God promised in Deuteronomy to bring them to repentance and restoration, Israel was being disciplined that they would return to the Lord.

Remember the wisdom of Proverbs 3 verse 12,. Now that's exactly what Israel faced. They were looking at unpleasant discipline and thinking of it as rejection rather than receiving undeserved favor as children of God.

They were being treated as sons. We remember in that vein how our justification in Christ has changed everything of how we view life. In the book of Romans chapter five, the apostle Paul presses this home and he says, because we have been justified by faith in verse one, we have peace with God.

And then he goes on to say, we can rejoice then in our sufferings, knowing what they produce, endurance, character, and hope, because God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. What Paul is saying there is that in these difficult circumstances and suffering, God is loving like a father.

Remember Hebrews 12 verse seven, it's for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. When God loves, he gives what is good. And what is the greatest good that God could ever give?

It's God himself. God who is love, loves us not in a distant act. God gives himself to us to form himself in us. God gives himself to his beloved. And God is orchestrating all things the Bible says for the good of those who love him.

And that good is to conform us to the image of his son, that he would be the firstborn of many brothers. God loves us to make us like him. So even dear Christian, our suffering under the love of God is not the hand of a harsh master punishing us.

It's the love of a heavenly father disciplining us and shaping us that we might have more of him. Scripture says that fathers who spare the rod hate their sons, but those who love them are diligent and disciplined.

And if earthly fathers know how to give what is good, will not God love us even more? It's unmerited love. And God reminds us this by the undeniable proof. God's love here is undeniable in verse 5. The Lord promises Israel to leave proof of his love.

Their eyes will see the destruction of Edom and they will proclaim God's greatness over Israel. And I think that's how we should understand verse 5 here. Many Hebraists and translations say that the preposition here beyond the border of Israel is better over the border of Israel.

That is its entire territory. It is over the land of Israel. They will proclaim great is the Lord. Israel will see God's distinguishing love over them as they are preserved as Edom is judged. The land of Edom is judged in judgment.

Israel is restored in grace. And God will prove his love, he says, before their eyes. God will make his name dwell among Israel and love his people and give his presence. He had already restored the temple in Jerusalem.

And while Edom was ended in judgment, God would be among them. So they will see God's love. They will have his presence and they will prove his greatness over them. God will give himself. And God proved his love by his presence.

And he did so to prove it in the fulfillment of all this is pointing to. Because one day God himself would walk around that temple in Jerusalem and he would say in John to destroy this temple. And in three days, I will raise it up.

He was speaking about the temple of his body. Now, the Lord Jesus could not have done that in a ziggurat in Babylon. God proved his love to Israel so that he could prove his love to people from every tribe, tongue, people and nation.

To all those he would bless through the line of Abraham. God shows his love for us, the Bible says, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. For 1 John 4, 10, and this is love. Not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Now, propitiation is a really fun word to say. It's even better to understand. It means that God satisfies his just judgment against us upon his son, the Lord Jesus on the cross, that his judgment would never fall again on any who belonged to him in Jesus.

One theologian said, propitiation proves love. Propitiatory love is the chief outshining of supreme splendor. God loves not in response, God loves by giving. And the greatest gift that the God of love has given is his own son.

And God gave his son to create his love in us. A love that would never be known otherwise, that we would gain the greatest good in existence forever, which is the loving God himself. God loved us by sending his son to die for our lovelessness, to bring us to himself in him, to create love for him in us that we would have his love for eternity.

That, friends, is the gospel, the good news of the love of God, that we would have life with him forever. That means, dear Christian, you can never answer the question, does God love me apart from the resounding yes in the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross in his resurrection?

Yes, God loves you. He sent his son that you might love him. John Owen said, reminds us of this by saying, eminently, the father himself loves you. Resolve of that, that you may hold communion with him in it and be no more troubled about it.

You can no way more trouble or burden God than by your unkindness in not believing. In other words, Owen says, what is the greatest unkindness that you and I can do to our great God? Not believe he loves you.

Dear Christian, God loves you. And we love and worship God by believing that he loves us eternally. We use telescopes to locate us properly in the universe. In a telescope, you bring a distant object into focus.

You bring what's far away near, as it were. But if you look through the wrong end of the telescope, it'll actually do the opposite. It'll distort and it'll push objects farther away. To bring our life into clarity, God reveals his eternal and immutable love.

And that's the telescope, if you will, by which we locate our place in the universe. But we have to look through the right lens. If we look through the lens of a hard marriage, bad economy, poor health, worse government, lame job, whatever, we begin to charge God with failing to love us.

And so what God does is he says, you're looking at the wrong end of the telescope. And so he flips it around to remind us, dear Christian, you're mine. I love you. I have loved you and will love you to the end.

View everything through the lens of the fact that I have and will love you forever. Amen, let's pray. Our Father, we praise you and thank you for your eternal love, which is beyond our comprehending. Certainly beyond anything we could sing or any song that could be written about you as far as fall short of your immeasurable, immense, immutable love.

Help us, Father, and garrison our hearts by your love. That we would trust you, that we would obey you, and that we will gladly seek your glory all our days because you loved us first and given us the love we enjoy for you as a gift.

We pray, our Father, that you would be exalted and honored as we meditate upon your goodness in Jesus' high and holy name.

Amen.