The Nature of Love (Lent 29, 2024)

Yes, God could condemn us, and yes, He knows all about us, but He chooses to love anyway. It’s the nature of love to feel deeply, and God’s Image is so important to Him that He went to the most extreme lengths to rescue it. He sent Jesus.

For us, as Image-bearers, it is the nature of love within us to feel, to know, and to choose. It’s why Adam and Eve weren’t created to be puppets and slaves. They had been given a glorious gift by God of freedom to feel, freedom to know, and freedom to choose.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then,
and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
(Galatians 5:1)

God’s nature of love gave us freedom because that’s what love does. Love doesn’t command. Love invites. But isn’t that the problem of freedom? That some people will choose to use it in ways we hate? Or maybe we recognize that we use it in ways we will hate someday?

Exercise: Think back over how you’ve used your freedom. Acting upon your desire to feel something, or know something, or choose something, and whether willful or in ignorance of what the consequences would be someday, would you have done it anyway? Then you know something of what Adam and Eve felt when they judged for themselves instead of relying on the love and grace of our God who judges justly. There are people who want to take away the freedom God gave you. What does that do to the nature of love?

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Lent 2013 looked at The Letter to the Romans: Paul’s Masterpiece to reclaim foundations of our Christian heritage and began February 13, 2013.
A very special and ever popular offering was Lent 2014’s Be Still and Know that I AM God which can be obtained through the archives beginning in March 2014.
Lent 2015 began on February 18, 2015 with a series entitled With Christ in the Upper Room: Final Preparations. We explored what is often called “The Upper Room Discourse” found in John chapters 13-17.
ReKindle, the Lent 2016 series, began on February 10, 2016 and encouraged us to rekindle our spiritual lives.
Light: There’s Nothing Like It was the 2017 Lent series and explored this metaphor often used to portray Christ. It is archived beginning March 1, 2017.
Lent 2018, we explored the questions of Pi and Chi (the Greek letter beginning the word Christos, which means Christ, Messiah, the Anointed One). We asked and answered the questions “Why?” from the movie Life of Pi as we discovered the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in a world of many faiths.
Lent 2019 gave us a deeper window into Easter “More to the Easter Story” since we miss so much when we rely only on a superficial understanding of the work of Christ. These devotionals are archived beginning March 6, 2019.
Our Lent 2020 devotional series offered prayer points surrounding “Be Thou My Vision” and were aimed at helping us to see God for who He is. The full set of devotionals are archived beginning February 26, 2020.
The theme for 2021 Lent Devotionals was how to live between two worlds while waiting for Christ’s return. Into the gap between the City of Man and its fixation upon sin and the City of God with its demand for holiness, two words minister peace: But God. Praise God for His intervention! They are archived beginning February 17, 2021.
Revelation in 40 devotionals for 2022 offered 40 vignettes, scenes, concepts, and thoughts to inspire us to read the Book of Revelation as it is written and to go deeper. They are archived beginning March 2, 2022.
Last year’s devotionals “Created to Display His Image” explored what it truly means to be made in God’s Image and the profound significance of that fact. They are archived beginning February 22, 2023.