FRIDAY 17th
1 John 4:9-10
‘In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In 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.’
Well, it’s taken me 40 devotions in this epistle of John’s so far to get to what is one of my favourite verses in this epistle, verse 10 ‘In 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.’ But before we consider it, we need to remind ourselves that the conduit of God’s love (if I can put it in such a way) is his Son! Remember John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son . . .’ God has always loved that which he has created, but especially humanity. Again we remember from Psalm 8, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him’, and God has always been mindful of mankind, and has always loved mankind even though we had rebelled against him, and the evidence of that love is that he was willing to send his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.
Have you ever wondered how God must have felt when Adam and Eve transgressed against him? He must have been heart-broken! And over the years that have passed, as God has looked down from heaven, his dwelling place and seen the ongoing rebellion of mankind towards him as the Creator, he must have been heart-broken beyond anything that we can ever imagine, and yet despite the rebellious attitude of every man and woman to have ever been born, God still loved, and he loved so much he was determined to bring about his plan of redemption, but at such a tremendous cost, it would require his Son to come and to lay down his life as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
And Jesus was willing to come, as John says in our text today, to manifest, to show, to demonstrate the immeasurable and incomparable love that God has for each one of us, even when we did not love him! And he did it, by laying aside his majesty and becoming a man, and being taken and crucified on a Cross at Calvary, taking upon himself your sin, my sin, in fact the sin of the world ‘so that whoever believes on him, will not perish but will have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). We will return to verse 10 again in our next devotion
Such love, pure as the whitest snow;
such love weeps for the shame I know;
such love, paying the debt I owe;
O Jesus, such love.
Such love, stilling my restlessness;
such love, filling my emptiness;
such love, showing me holiness;
O Jesus, such love.
Such love, springs from eternity;
such love streaming through history;
such love, fountain of life to me;
O Jesus, such love.