God loves you
You are considering becoming a Christian.
In doing so you will grasp a bigger scene than your life lived up to now has seen. You will grasp and be grasped by Love that brought being out of nothing, Jesus from a Virgin’s womb and life out of death. The Maker anticipated the wrong use of free will by human beings – sin – and its destructive effect upon the world by a plan for its remaking executed 2000 years ago which you can be made part of. ‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him’ (Ephesians 2:4-6).
God made humans for friendship. Sin came in as a barrier to such friendship. By dying and rising for us Christ destroyed that barrier. Those who accept the risen Lord Jesus Christ – who become Christians – are raised by grace from their sins into friendship with God. In immense love God gave us life so every human being might receive the grace of the Holy Spirit if they so wish. To be a Christian is to have welcomed ‘God’s love … poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’ (Romans 5:5).
How do you welcome God’s love? Go in your heart and mind to places where it is claimed eternity intersects time in Jesus Christ, such as the crib of Bethlehem, the cross of Calvary, the words of scripture, the font of baptism and the bread and wine of the eucharist. All these places are transparent to the immense love reaching down to us in Jesus Christ. A magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a burning knot of heat that can ignite things. If you look at the cross with faith in Christ as God’s Son your heart will be set on fire by the ray of immense love that is concentrated there. ‘The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you’ (cf Galatians 2:20)
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3:16).
Approach Jesus with faith in his divinity and you have to place his crucifixion at the climax of human history. It is an act of substitution: Jesus dies in our place so as to live in our place. The holiness of God, affronted by sin, demands a penalty which he himself provides. The shedding of the blood of God’s Son Jesus Christ fulfils ancient sacrificial rites by providing the sinless victim who alone can expiate sin. As we read in Ephesians ‘Christ loved us, giving himself up for us as an offering and a sweet smelling sacrifice to God’ (Ephesians 5:2).
To put faith in the crucifixion of Jesus is to recognise a holy God who reaches out to us in love though we are sinners. In his holiness he cannot be reconciled to sin (Habakkuk 1:13a), but through the sacrifice of Jesus upon the Cross the horror and power of sin is potentially overcome and we are credited with God’s holiness. The power of evil over humankind is overcome by the Cross, so Christ has been likened to a triumphant general who leads believers in his victory procession (2 Corinthians 2:14).
We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God. This is the Christian revelation, nothing man made but something revealed to us by God ‘out of the great love with which he loved us’ shown in historical events. These events invite the consideration of every human being. The rational mind can take us to Jesus, like a horse to water, but it cannot make us drink of him without faith.
Faith and reason are two wings on which the human spirit rises to God. Without the gift of faith we reason Jesus down to a level we can tolerate.
We conform Jesus to ourselves when the real business should be to conform ourselves to him. By the gift of faith Jesus complements our rational understanding so we can rise heavenwards and live lives open to the possibilities of God which go beyond our imagining.
God you sent Jesus your Son to die in my place, bearing my sins, so as to live in my place by the indwelling of your Spirit. Though such love is beyond my understanding, help me to put full trust in it so I can be a Christian. Amen.
