The gospel: you are already loved!

Imagine, right now, as you read this little gospel, that you are already loved. What do I mean by loved? I mean, you are loved with a love that transcends even time itself, a love that exists in an eternal realm.

If we look across nature, we see hints of love here and there. We know that the mother and father at the birth of their child have a natural love for their child; we see various demonstrations of love in the animal kingdom. And even in the plant world, they exist just to offer life to various creatures around them. God is love. And the beauty with God is that He does not ask us to do things to be accepted and enter into His love.

We are now in the dispensation of grace; the days of trying to be accepted by God have been done away with. You don’t have to go to church, pray, fast, study the Bible, and perform charity acts to be loved by God. God has sent His only begotten Son because He “so loved the world.” The Father already ordained this loving demonstration before the world was even created, before we did anything ourselves!

Every religion, love is conditional, whether it be unconscious or conscious, there is a term, a condition, that you must fulfill to be accepted, lovable, and valued. However, we see that the Christian faith is not that we have to do something to be loved, but to accept that we are already loved by the Father in Jesus Christ, His Son, in a personal way. God personally and individually loves you as your person. When God sent His Son, He knew He was sending Him into a world where no one loved Him. Jesus Christ was rejected, abandoned, and all He did was love people and speak the truth to them.

And so, this is usually our dilemma is not just that we struggle to love God, but receive His love. At the cross, Jesus stood there with no one loving Him, and even for those three hours when darkness covered the land, the Father had to look away. The cup of God’s wrath that was not unleashed on the world was finally being poured out upon Jesus Christ. He was suffering the ramifications of your sins, your resistance, your rebellion, and your pride.

This is why at the cross, no one stands righteous in God’s sight; everyone is guilty. Everyone stands in a place where their love for God is empty, shallow, and cold.

“In due time Christ died for the ungodly…God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

And,

“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atonement for our sins” (Romans 5:8-10, 1 John 4:10).

We are not coming to a cross where we love God; we are coming to a cross acknowledging we are wretched sinners who only love ourselves, and we need help to love God. We are coming to a cross where we have already been loved, where the blood of Jesus was poured out to release you from your sins as you confess them and repent.

The cross can’t be added to, nor taken away from, it is complete. And there is no other way we can have eternal life, only through this precious sacrifice. It’s life for life. Just as we rely on the sacrifices of various animals and plant life forms to keep our bodies alive, we need the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to keep our spirit alive unto eternal life in the Son and the Father.

Religion, including the organized church, consumes us with our worth and value being found in what we do and what we say, but the beauty of the gospel is it’s about what Jesus Christ has done, and what He said.

“It is finished!” (John 19:30).

You can’t find the finished work anywhere else; no one has completed it, but Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, so come to Him alone…

The love of Christ lives on eternally. Jesus Christ sits at the right hand, resurrected from the dead, alive and living in immortal power as a resurrected living created Man and the eternal Creator. Jesus Christ defeated sin and death in perfect love! So, let the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ drive away all your fears, because Christ has saved you from punishment and judgment by His blood and justification!