The Best Is Yet To Come

At Rapha, we recite a declaration at the end of each class. It is designed to confirm our position in Jesus as believers. It gives a list of different attributes that are ours because of Christ's redemptive work.
I am fully pleasing----I am completely forgiven -----I am absolutely complete in Christ. And the one that always strikes my heart.....I am deeply loved. 

It isn't the fact that I am loved. I am taken by "who" loves me. God! He loves me.
We sometimes think of ourselves as being unlovable because of what we have done in the past.
We let what we've done define who we are and that is so not right.
But God looks at us and sees us in a different light. He sees us, as believers, through the shed blood of Jesus.
His love for us is pure and undefiled.
A love that is unlike anything the world has to offer.
For God so loved the world.....
It was his love for his creation that spurred him to carry through with his plan to restore everything that was lost when man sinned in the garden.

In Jeremiah 31:3, we read where God is speaking to Jeremiah concerning the people of Israel.
"The LORD has appeared of old unto me, saying, "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee."
In spite of Israel's repeated turning away from God.
In spite of Israel replacing God with the pagan gods of their neighbors....
In spite of Israel rejecting God's prophets sent to warn them of coming judgements unless they repent....
God still says that he has loved them with an everlasting love.
That kind of love is hard for me to comprehend, yet my Father in heaven has a heart that burns with such a love.
It is for this reason that I desire to lay down my will and my life to follow after him.

God on you....
mb