Goodness is delivered through God’s love, and there is never a moment or fraction in all of time that this isn’t true. God is good all the time, and all the time, God is good. Through His goodness, grace, and mercy, our God also informs us that He has a horrible enemy, and His enemy is not good in any way. This enemy is satan, the devil, and his darkness and evil are beyond what any of us can imagine. God created satan as an angel of light, but he sinned against God in the same way that many of us have. We also know that satan continues to disguise himself to plot against us, God’s children of light. You might think, “this is terrible!” and indeed it is, but we are never to be afraid of what the enemy might do, because we have been empowered by God to overcome him. 1John 4:4(NKJV) declares, “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.”
You might ask how it is that the enemy gained so much power. The answer to this question is that in the very beginning, satan did to Adam what he tries to do to us. God had given Adam dominion and authority over the earth, and when Adam disobeyed God and bowed to the enemy in the Garden of Eden, everything that God had given Adam then belonged to the devil. So, the long and short of it is that through an act of treason, the enemy gained dominion and authority over the earth, and in this same way, he acquires more power by tricking us into giving over to him what God has given to us. We do this through our sin.
Through His infinite mercy and grace, God doesn’t cast us out of His family when we make mistakes and sin against what He’s told us in His Word. He set things up so that we have a mediator and advocate in the Lord Jesus Christ. 1John 2:1(NLT) says, “My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous.” Our Heavenly Father doesn’t want us to sin, because sin can break our fellowship with Him. But when we do sin, Jesus Christ is our advocate, our lawyer in the courts of heaven, and he is always on our side.
Jesus Christ is on our side, because that is where His Father is as well. Our accuser, satan, brings charges against us, but the penalty for our sin has been paid through the sacrifice of our beloved and blessed Savior. Romans 5:8-11(NLT) says, “8 But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. 9 And since we have been made right in God's sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly save us from God's condemnation. 10 For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. 11 So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.”
God’s love for us is real and true love. His love isn’t like our love. We fall in and out of love all the time, and that really isn’t how love operates. Real and true love is constant and abiding. It doesn’t trip out when things become difficult. It doesn’t slip when we’re feeling insecure and unsteady. God’s love is strong and true, and John 3:16 tells us that He demonstrated this overwhelming and unconditional love by giving His only begotten Son to die for our sins. God loves us beyond what we can imagine. We might ask, “Why does He loves us this way when we are always messing up?” That’s the extraordinarily beautiful and powerful thing about God, He loves because He IS love. He doesn’t need a reason to love us, He just does.
God tells us in Isaiah 55:8-9(NLT), “My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” It is impossible for us to count all the ways in which our Heavenly Father loves us but think about what would happen if He loved us only when we please Him. We’d be in a heap of trouble because we go against God's standards all the time. What if His love wasn’t unconditional, and He would withdraw the sun, moon, stars, water, and air if we disobeyed Him? For most of us, the answer to this question is never a thought in our minds because we lean so heavily upon God goodness, and we do this mostly without even realizing it.
Romans 8:39(NLT) declares, “No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing we do or won’t do, nothing we say or don’t say, no obstacle, tribulation, or trouble will ever separate us from God’s love or stop Him from loving us. There’s no greater comfort than this. God's love is dependable and reliable in every way, and we should rejoice in it every day, because He’s proven that He is worthy and deserving of our fully persuaded faith because His love is the glue that holds every aspect of our lives together. As we learn more about our Heavenly Father with each passing day, our hearts will swell more and more with gratitude, and we will witness repeatedly that God’s love is true and it never fails.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“True Love Doesn’t Need A Reason”, written for Springfield Fellowship © 2023. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
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