Advent Season Love
A lot of us will do some crazy things for love, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of anything crazier than a story I ran across a few years ago. A teenager’s girlfriend broke up with him, and he was devastated. He loved her so much and began thinking of ways that he could get her to love him back, and he came up with what he thought was the perfect plan.
Get this, he actually convinced one of his friends to take a gun and shoot him. Not somewhere that would kill him, but somewhere that would just injure him. He was convinced that once his ex-girlfriend saw he had been shot, she would feel bad for him and get back together with him. She didn’t. Ouch.
Now maybe you haven’t gone to quite that length to get someone to love you, but you can probably look back in your life and see things you’ve done to get this need of love met in your life.
Maybe you’ve tried to change the way you look or your personality. You thought that if you changed yourself, someone would notice you and love you.
Maybe you’ve offered your body to someone in hopes that they would love you.
Or maybe you’ve even thought you had found someone who loved you and married that person, only to have that feeling go away. So you looked to find it online or in someone else.
It could even be that as you look back, you see that you’ve been trying to earn your own family’s love. You tried to make good grades, excel in extracurricular activities, or establish a great career, all in hopes that you would finally hear your own mom and dad just say the words, “I love you.”
To be loved is a universal need that we all have. We are all looking for love, but sadly as hard as we look for it and chase after it, it seems to be forever out of our grasp. Even when we think we’ve found it, at some point it always comes up empty and begins to disappoint.
Is true love even possible to find?
GOD IS LOVE
The Bible reveals to us that God is love (1 Jn 4:8), and that his love is a different kind of love than the love we see in the world. The apostle Paul even described God’s love as being so wide, long, high, and deep that you and I can’t even completely fathom it.
It’s like the ocean. We don’t even know how deep the ocean is in some places. It just seems to keep going and going. That’s what God’s love is like. His love runs so deep, that it is impossible to run out of it.
His love is the only completely fulfilling and satisfying love that is out there. Everything else pales in comparison to it.
GOD’S LOVE IS SACRIFICIAL
This is the season of Advent, and through the coming of Jesus Christ, we see God’s love is a sacrificial love. In John 1, we are told,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. (Jn 1:1, 14)
Do you know how sacrificial it was for Jesus, the eternal Son of God to take on a human nature? As God, He wasn’t subject to all the things we experience on this planet as human beings… hunger, thirst, tiredness, pain, and suffering.
Jesus sacrificed His right to not have to experience those things, and do you know why? For you! Luke 19:10 says,
For the Son of Man (Jesus) came to seek and to save the lost.
That’s you. You are the lost. I am the lost. As sinners before a holy God, we are all the lost. Jesus was born into this world to come on a rescue mission for you. He sacrificed his rights to never have to experience hunger, thirst, tiredness, pain, and suffering all for you. Why?
Because of God’s love for you. John 3:16 says,
For God so LOVED the WORLD that he GAVE his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.
Remember earlier when we said some people have done some crazy things for love? Is there anything crazier than the God of the universe leaving the comfort and glory of heaven, to come here to suffer and die on a cross out of his love for people who have turned their backs on him?
GOD’S UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
Do you realize how much you are loved? How much you are worth to God? You are worth the life of His Son!
Now you may not think so. You may not feel like you deserve his love. And the truth is you don’t. There’s nothing that you and I can do to merit God’s love. But that is what is so unbelievable about God’s love. It’s unconditional.
When John tells us “For God so loved the world,” that is comprehensive. The “world” includes you, me, and everyone that has ever lived.
You don’t have to meet a certain criteria. God doesn’t just love certain kinds of people. The “world” includes every kind of person there is, and Jesus came to die for all of us while we were still sinners (Ro. 5:8).
It’s one thing to be loved when we perform well, but God’s love is extended to us even on our worst day.
Jesus was born into this world out of God’s unconditional love for you.
WHAT IS OUR RESPONSE TO THIS KIND OF LOVE?
Receive it and rest in it. God’s love is available to you, and He offers it to you as a gift. It’s called grace.
You receive his love by faith, and once you do, you have all of it. Your cup is filled up, and it never runs out.
So, once you have received it, the only proper response is to quit trying to get Him or anyone else to love you more fully. It’s impossible. God can’t love you any more, and He can’t love you any less than He already does. And no one else’s love will ever compare to His either.
This Advent season as you focus on the birth of Christ, would you allow it to remind you of His unconditional, sacrificial love for you? And would you rest in it? It never ever runs out.