People are meant to walk out their lives in love; meant to experience the beauty of perfect love. When we walk outside of that, we are throwing aside and rejecting the fullest life we could ever have. It’s like a bird with its wings clipped, trapped on the ground. The bird is meant to fly, that is how it fully lives out its life. We are cutting the fullness of our lives when choose to reject the love of God, every time we run from that love, we cut ourselves down…

I want to give you a couple of definitions:

Love: a deep feeling of affection for another.

Agape:  the deepest love, which is based on doing good things for another person. This is the love shown by our God, a deeper love, incomparable love, for He has given us the greatest gift of His son.

There is something that I never have been able to fully express, never. It cannot be expressed by any words. It is beyond all reason or thought to be able to grasp how incredible and incomparable it is, and that is the grace of our God shown to us by Jesus Christ. Grace that has been so incredibly lavished on us; us who deserve nothing, absolutely nothing; who if anything, deserve the opposite, deserve punishment and death.

The idea of this grace is worth days, years, lifetimes, and infinity of meditation. The simple fact that I am anything at all, that I exist, let alone am blessed by my Savior to such a degree; which it is out of His good and perfect plan, to bring glory to his name – it is incredible.

A verse we have heard a thousand times over, and I will gladly hear it another thousand times thousands more:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” – John 3:16-17

Who are we that God loves us so much?

A verse from Psalm 8 just shakes me up. It puts “myself” into perspective, and it puts me in steadfast awe.

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” – Psalm 8:3-4

I think that this is one reason why I absolutely love gazing at the stars. It never gets old to me, never; I can look at them for hours upon hours.  I think that it is because I see a sliver, just the tiniest glimpse (honestly don’t know if I can even say that) of the perspective of how infinite our creator is. The unlimited vastness of this universe; he flicks it into existence with His fingers, and yet, it all can’t begin to describe the infinite glory of our God. God cannot be put in a box. It is sobering, humbling, beautiful, and awe inspiring. And this is the God, which loved/loves us, and who chose to demonstrate His perfect love to us by letting His own son to be mocked, spit on, beaten, flogged, and nailed to a cross.  This all was done for you and me, for the very people who murdered him.

The lines from one of my favorite hymns say this:

How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory
Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers
It was my sin that left Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished
I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection
Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom

WHAT?? WHAT?? What is this? Just to rest my mind and dwell on the idea of this. If it was just you, just you alone, Christ still would have died. He went through hell, literally, for you.

His death was so different from any other, no martyr can be compared, no other cause for death. He didn’t die for people who loved Him, or people who would ever love Him, many would, but many never will. They spat on Him, they mocked Him and He died for these very people that murdered Him. Someone who had done absolutely nothing wrong a single day of His life, only pure utter goodness.., pure absolute love, yet… He was murdered.

I give this example (and this is far, over simplifying, the vastness of what Christ did, for it is so simple, and what Christ did is beyond our reason): Imagine a man who is a rapist, a murderer, a betrayer, a molester, an adulterer, a thief, and a liar. Let’s just say that this man has no remorse for the things he has done, and for the sake of this argument, we will even say he thinks he was justified in what he did, more or less he feels no remorse. Now this man was caught and is sentence to death, as he deserves, does he not? I personally would think he deserves to die. But then you come along and you say to this man, I will die in your stead. Then when the day comes for you to be executed in this man’s stead, he comes, he spits on you, then pulls the switch mocking and laughing at you as he does so and all while you slowly die. Then this man goes on for the rest of his days acting exactly as he has done before…

Sound like something you could do? Or for that matter anyone? Yeah, I don’t think so.

That is only the slightest analogy of what Jesus did for us. He took all the of the world’s sin and shame, and bore it in a moment…

I try to imagine this, for me, imagining the darkest moment in my life thus far, then multiplying that billions of times more, BILLIONS, then being separated from my God, and being forsaken by all your closest friends while carrying that burden, and dying with it. It is impossible to understand or imagine, but that is what He did for us. It wrings your heart of all emotion. It is incredible.

Thanks to his burden. You never have to experience that loss and separation from our father God. Never. The divide of separation has been broken.

I feel like all I do is repeat this over and over and over. But to be honest, it messes with my head! It breaks me down. It is the one thing that continually causes me to weep. I will be lost in tears days upon days for the rest of my life trying to understand how incredible this is… It is beyond anything that makes sense, anything reasonable… It is madness, and it is beautiful.

I was listening to a sermon a while back by John Piper and a few quotes stuck with me:

“Your mind should be boggled; I don’t feel like I am truly encountering God unless I am being shocked, why I would think any other way.”

“His scope can’t be anything, if I get within a billion light years of Him, I am going to be shocked; I am in the business of looking to be shocked.”

God should never in anyway seem simple to us, blah to us, just “oh ok” to us. Our heads should hurt, our hearts should ache, we should be heavy with the incredible, awe inspiring glory that is our God. You know the type of ache you get when you get a good workout? It hurts, but its good. It should be like that in your heart and head… multiplied by infinity.

After all, who are we that we that God has done this to save us? We are so polluted, sinful, fallen and lost. Our God, who has the expanse of the stars, all the beauty of the universe, all things beyond and completely unfathomable to us; and even yet, our God loves us so, so, so much. Grace is more or less defined that we get something that we do not deserve.

So many do not know of His love and His grace, they may know of it, but they do not KNOW his grace. They do not know the presence of God; the incredible, beautiful, unreal overflowing grace that shows the most perfect love.

It is beyond me, beyond anything I can write, beyond any words. Yet that is all I can do, is cry out about the beauty and majesty of my God. That should be an all-consuming inferno of your heart. If you haven’t known the presence of God, or if you have gone too long without drawing into it for too long, then cry out to Him, and He will make Himself known. Cry out with your heart humbled and contrite before Him, and He will be there to meet you. Always. He does not change, He is our constant.

There is nothing greater. Nothing more satisfying. For in Him, our Savior, Christ Jesus we are to find all our satisfaction.

“God is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in Him.” – Desiring God Ministries