The Love of My Life

Who is the love of your life?  Your spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend?  Maybe it's a parent or child?  The person who is the of love our life, is the one for which we would go to the ends of the earth.  We would sacrifice our most precious item for this person.  Many of us would even give our lives.

For God so love the world, that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 
John 3:16

We've read it before.  It was probably one of the first scriptures many of us remember hearing.  For some, this scripture has become cliche'.  It is ubiquitous.  We see it at sporting events, on street corners,
and any number of other places. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Whether we have been a Christian for 50 seconds or 50 years, we have learned that Jesus loves us.  We know God loves us.  This is the basis of our spirituality.  The question is, do we truly understand the depths of this love?  Do we fully comprehend what it means that God came down from Heaven in earthly form through Jesus Christ, lived and suffered with us, died for crimes and sins He never committed, defeated death, was resurrected, and sent His Holy Spirit to comfort us until we are able to to walk with Him in Heaven?

Isaiah 53:1-12 describes the persecution Christ endured in order for us to live an eternal life in Heaven.
People made fun of him, and even his friends left him.  He was a man who suffered a lot of pain and sickness.  We treated him like someone of no importance, like someone people will not even look at but turn away from in disgust.  The fact is, it was our suffering he took on himself; he bore our pain.  But we thought that God was punishing him, that God was beating him for somethin he did.  But he was punished for what we did.  He was crushed because of our guilt.  He took the punishement we deserved, and this brought us peace.  We were healed because of his pain.  We had all wandered away like sheep.  We had gone our own way.  And yet the Lord put all our guilt on him. (v. 3-6)

Ephesians 2:1-6 highlights the fullness of God's love towards us.

It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.  You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live.  You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.  We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt life doing it, all of us in the same boat.  It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.  Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.  He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ.  He did all this on his own, with no help from us!  Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Basically, God, the creator of all that is known and unknown, loves us so much that he received the death sentence we rightly deserved.  Moreover, even when God should have thrown all of us away, He decided to pick us up out of the mess and chaos we created, clean us, and then sit us among royalty for eternity.  And, God did all of this fully knowledgeable of the fact that we were not only unworthy, but continuously fallible as well.  This is unconditional love!  God chose us to be the love of His life, do we choose him?

1 John 4:9-11 (NLT)
God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.  This is real love - not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.