| From the Vicarage |
Richard Marshall |
“I have loved you,” says the Lord. “But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?”
Malachi 1 verse 2
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The motivation for our Christian life comes from God’s love for us. God loves us, and so we love God in return. His love for us is so wide and deep and high that nothing can overcome it (Romans 8:39). He shows his love for us in creating us and the world for us to inhabit, in giving us a conscience and the ability to reason - with freewill to allow us the choice of whether to love Him or not. And also his love is shown in his coming to earth in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. These three things: creation, conscience and Christ, give purpose and meaning to our lives.
Creation: we exist because God loved to bring us into being.
We have purpose and meaning in our lives as God’s Word declares: we are known by God from when we are formed in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-16). Even when we were coming into being He was there.
We have the evidence of God’s ‘eternal power and divine nature’ as we see and learn about the created order of the universe (Romans 1:20) – therefore we are ‘without excuse’. We should be filled with awe and wonder at the splendour of the created order, and the power and majesty of the one who made it.
Although the world as we know it is subject to decay, with suffering and disease and natural disasters –that is because of our rebellion against God and these things are designed to act as a sign that we must repent (Luke 13:2-5). In the Kingdom of God there is ‘no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ (Revelation 21:4). It is a cruel trick of the Evil One to get us to ‘blame God’ when it was following Satan’s lies that caused the Fall of the original perfect creation and brought death, disease and decay into the world.
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Conscience: We have the capacity to make choices, including the choice whether to love God. Our conscience makes us aware of sin, and helps us to sense what is right and what is wrong.
We have purpose and meaning in our lives because God loves us, and longs for us to love Him in return. We have rebelled against Him by deliberately going against his commands, thereby serving ‘the God of this World’ - Satan. Only by God’s grace working in our lives can we come to see the truth - how things really stand between us and God – and what our eternal destiny might be, depending upon the choices we make.
We can choose to repent and put our faith in Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. We can open our lives to the leading and guiding of His Holy Spirit. We can choose to be the people he created us to be, full of the fruit of the Spirit in our character (Galatians 5:22) and drawing others into the Kingdom of God. He has good works ‘prepared in advance for us to do’ (Ephesians 2:10) and ‘each will be rewarded according to his own labour (1 Corinthians 3:8).
Christ: God came in Christ as our Saviour, to make a way for us to be right with Him
If we are truly Christ’s then we are declared ‘righteous’ before God. Not that we deserve it, but Jesus died in our place on the cross and rose from the dead. The historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection means we can know we have eternal life through Christ, if we have truly committed ourselves to him. We have meaning and purpose in our lives because we know that in Christ God demonstrated his unbounded love for us, even when we were in rebellion against Him (Romans 5:8).
When we lose sight of his love then our response weakens and our faith can become superficial – going through the motions, rather than living by the grace of God, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us visit again the truths which undeniably show that God loves us with his very being (1 John 4:16) that we might love him all the more.
May you be richly filled with all God’s blessings, knowing meaning and purpose in your life through Him.
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