There are so many people in this world who are living a lie. It’s a bold statement I know but just take a look around, how many people see themselves for what they truly are? How many people see others for what they truly are?

I have to be honest with you, for the first thirty-six years of my life I was pretty much living a lie, here is what that lie looked like. You’re told in this world that if you work hard enough you can do anything you want to, you can be anyone you want to be, you can have just about anything you want to have, just work hard and you’ll make it, just work hard and you’ll be successful.

So I did, I worked incredibly hard as a military officer and then in my own IT consulting firm and with my business partners we were pretty successful, we had an international consulting practice. I drove a big expensive car, I lived in a big house and you know what, I was on my way to real success.

The problem was that, on the inside and let’s face it that’s where you live, that’s where your emotions and your feelings and your thoughts are, it just didn’t satisfy me. This was a real insight for me, success isn’t satisfying. The world will tell you that it is, but it simply isn’t, it’s hollow. Any happiness or satisfaction it brings you is fleeting, here today, gone tomorrow.

So in a very real sense I felt like a fraud. Other people looked at me and they saw success but I was discovering something else entirely. And when other people looked at me they saw a tough, hardnosed so and so who’d climb over anybody to get where he was going.

You see that’s the other part of the lie that I was living, I didn’t see people for who they really were, I didn’t see other people’s gifts and abilities and talents and creativity. Other people didn’t really have any worth to me except to the extent that they could act as stepping stones for me to walk over to get where I was going.

Now that’s quite an admission really isn’t it? But there you go, that was the lie that I was living and these days as I look around I see so many other people living out their versions of life’s lie. “You’ll be happy if you have this, if you buy a cute puppy then you’ll be happy, if you hit budget this month, if you do this, if you do that, then you’ll be successful”. And so what happens is that the world has become uber- competitive, the world has become transactional and in the middle of all that love has become conditional.

As I said earlier we’re in the middle of a series of messages called Love Is based on that powerful Scripture about love that we find in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Let’s just have another listen, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 4 to 7:

Love is patient, love is kind. Love isn’t envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It doesn’t insist on its own way, it’s not irritable or resentful. It doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And the part that I’d like to take a brief look at today is the bit where it says that love doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing but it rejoices in the truth. To be honest I think most of us don’t think all that often of love and truth in the one sentence, what does truth have to do with love after all, good question? And the answer is rather a lot.

I mentioned earlier how badly I treated people back in those days when I was living my personal version of the lies that we live and that’s what happens. When we’re living a lie, when we’re kidding ourselves and we’ve lost sight of the truth we end up treating people badly and we justify that by telling ourselves that our career is more important, our success is more important or whatever it is that we’re striving for is more important.

And so what we end up doing is exactly what the Apostle Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 6, we end up rejoicing in wrong doing instead. Now not everyone is a Type A driven personality like me, some people live their lie at the opposite end of that spectrum, some people believe their lie that they are worthless, no good, failures, there’s no hope, nothing is ever going to change.

These days we have a label for all of that, we bundle it all together and we call it low self esteem and those people end up living lives as victims. And in the process they treat other people badly as well because they have no love to give, they’re so insecure that when anyone ever disagrees with them, whenever anyone doesn’t treat them exactly the way they believe they ought to be treated they start behaving badly.

Love doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing, love rejoices in the truth. Makes sense when you look at it that way. There’s a parable that Jesus told that’s had a huge impact on my life in helping me to see the truth. Have a listen, Luke chapter 18 verses 9 to 14:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee standing by himself was praying thus, ‘God I thank you that I’m not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.

But the tax collector standing far off wouldn’t even look up to heaven but he was beating his breasts and saying, ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you this man went down to his home justified rather than the other one. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled but all who humble themselves will be exalted.

I used to be like the Pharisee, all full of self righteousness, the thing that changed me was encountering Jesus. Having a personal encounter, getting to know Him, giving my life to Him. It didn’t take long for me to realise in the presence of Jesus that I was living a lie. And now when I go to God I feel so much more like that tax collector totally reliant on God’s grace to deliver me from my sin.

Jesus said this very same thing in a different way during His Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5 verse 3:

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

In other words those who are going to inherit the Kingdom of God are the ones who realise their spiritual poverty; those who get real with themselves, those who see things for what they are, who see themselves and others for who they are. Okay so I’ve laid my soul bare to you today, I’ve shared with you part of my journey from a life of lies to a life of truth, a journey which by the way has a long way yet to run, none of us has arrived yet, at least I haven’t.

But what about your life, to what extent are you living a life that’s tainted, distorted, misdirected by some lies that the world’s dropped on your head and into your heart? What are you striving for, perhaps or what sense of inadequacy is robbing you of the ability to love? I know they’re hard questions but they’re questions that need to be asked and answered if you’re going to live in the freedom that Jesus came to give you.

It can be scary to confront those lies, it’s hard to admit that we’ve not been loving people the way we should because we’re the ones who’ve been getting things wrong. But there’s no need to be afraid, the Apostle John puts it this way, 1 John chapter 4 verse 18:

There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out all fear. For fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears hasn’t reached perfection in love.

My friend Jesus came to set you free and as He said it Himself when the Son of man sets you free you’ll be free indeed. The reason we’re chatting about this today is that I believe that Jesus wants to set you free, today, not just a little bit but completely. Free indeed, how about it? Love doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing, love rejoices in the truth.

Loving other people can be hard; in fact love always involves tough bits because the people whom we love aren’t perfect, far from it. And let’s face it you and I aren’t perfect either, so when two imperfect people set about loving one another there’s going to be some conflict, some pain, some hurt and some disappointment and sometimes what we want to do is to give up.

The statistics about divorce rates in the western world seem to be on the improve. That’s a surprise for some people. Here in Australia where I live around 40% of first marriages end in divorce. That’s down slightly from around 43% and all indications are that the trend is continuing. That’s a good thing, right?

I suspect things are pretty much the same across the western world but what that apparently promising statistic hides is the reality that far fewer people are getting married in the first place. Most couples these days just live together first, the try before you buy plan and a bunch of them come to the conclusion, “what’s the point of getting a marriage certificate, things are just fine the way they are.”

And so in a sense those divorce statistics are being skewed by the fact that probably those marriages that were more likely to have failed didn’t happen in the first place. There doesn’t seem to be any stats on failed de facto relationships.

It’s funny, although perhaps not all surprising, how the nature of relationships change the more affluent a society becomes. When you’re living in poverty people rely a lot on each other, on community, on family. Those social constructs are vital in fact to survival but the more affluent we become the less reliant we think we’ve become on one another.

When I was young most wives and mothers worked at home, not outside the home. Marriages hung together more because it was hard for women to leave even when the man was behaving badly. Now I’m not saying that men behaving badly is a good thing nor am I saying that the wives being completely financially dependent on their husbands is a good thing either, I’m just stating a historical fact.

These days however many women, depending on where you live of course, are financially independent so it’s no surprise that most divorces are initiated by women. My point in all this is that as we become more affluent relationships become less important to our survival and therefore more disposable.

Like an empty takeaway coffee cup, just throw it out in the bin, it’s all getting too hard, the pain of dealing with the same faults, the same foibles, the same weaknesses, I just can’t see it getting any better, I’ve had enough. Not just in marriages but in wider families, amongst so called friends, “that’s it in the bin.”

If you’ve been able to join me on the program over the last week and a half you’ll know that we’re in a middle of a series of messages called Love Is based on that famous passage about love in 1 Corinthians in the New Testament. I want to dive into that right now and see what it says about disposable love, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 7:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

Now the Bible says of itself that all Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, correction, training and righteousness. You’ll find that in 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 a bit later on in the New Testament, and that’s true, but as Scriptures go I think you’ll struggle to find many verses in the Bible that pack more punch in so few words than this one, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 7. Let me read it again slowly just so you can take it in.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

Let’s just pull that apart for the moment. Love bears all things. No there are no exclusions in the fine print, love bears ALL things. All the mistakes of the other person, all their failures and foibles, all that they’ve done, are doing and will do wrong, love, real love, true love, unconditional love which is the sort of love that’s being talked about here, real love bears all things.

I have some dear friends going back many years and a good many years ago the husband had an affair, actually a couple of affairs and whilst she had to show some tough love his wife stood by him and all these years on they are happily married. All things. Love also believes all things and hopes all things.

It’s so easy to get discouraged in relationships, really it is. You know that old Chinese water torture where they’d torture a man by dripping water on his forehead for days on end until each little drop felt like a brick falling on his head. That’s how it is in close relationships too.

A person’s weaknesses, when they impact you again and again and again and again, end up feeling like torture, you want to give up, you can’t see any hope of things getting better. Love bears all things, love believes all things, love hopes all things. See love always looks for the good, love always believes the best and hopes for the best and tries to bring the best out in the other person. Love always finds a way.

Love takes that difficult person to God and hands them over to Him; Lord I can’t help this person but you can. Lord I can’t get through to them but you can and Lord while you are working in their life, in their heart work in me too, make me the best husband, the best wife, the best parent, the best son, the best daughter, the best friend that I can possibly be to them.

Show me how I can be a help not a hindrance, fill me with your Holy Spirit so that I can bear all things, so that I can believe in you, so that I can hope in you for things to change, in Jesus name, in Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

See that’s what love does and on top of that love endures all things. Have you ever done endurance training? I have in the military. There is one thing that all forms of endurance training have in common, they all hurt a lot. By definition if you’re going to be doing endurance training you are hurting. There is no form of endurance that doesn’t hurt, got it?

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

Do you see how much punch that verse packs? What would this world look like if you and I decided just to live out that one verse? I passionately believe that God is speaking to us, to you and to me today through His Word and here’s how it goes. There is such incredible power in the Word of God. I think we Christians often trifle with God’s Word as though somehow it’s just words on a page but no, Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12:

Indeed the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the human heart.

And that’s what I believe is happening here in our hearts today.

I want to take you now into your relationships, the ones that are difficult for you right at the moment, the ones where you’re losing hope, where you’re feeling as though it’s never ever, ever going to get any better. I believe that those are the very relationships that the Lord our God is speaking into today, through His Spirit and His Word. And I believe that He wants you to hear this singular message very clearly.

In Him there is hope, in Him you can believe in good things, in Him, in His power, in the power of the Holy Spirit, you can endure all things. And while all this is going on, while you feel the hurt and the pain He is doing a mighty work in you. He is changing you, softening you, humbling you and getting you ready for the amazing things that lie ahead. Things that you would never have been able to do if you hadn’t travelled through these difficult days.

Can I tell you a couple of decades ago when I went through great hurt and what felt like great harm in this area of love in my life I met Jesus in that place. If I hadn’t been through that terrible pain back then I wouldn’t be able to share the love of Christ with you as I do today. There is always hope in Christ and Christ alone and I’m absolutely convinced that that’s the good news that God wants you to hear today.

Have you ever been tempted to give up on life, to give up on a relationship, to say, “up, that’s it, I’ve had enough”, and just walk away? I wonder where we’d be, you and I, if Jesus did that to us.

So over the past two weeks we’ve been talking about love, L. O. V. E. The one topic that more songs are being written about and crooned over than any other subject. I’m pretty sure that you can think of your top three favourite love songs of all time. For me it’s: ‘Sinead O’Connor – Nothing Compares To You’, ‘Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ and ‘Elvis Presley – Love Me Tender’.

Now there are thousands, dare I say tens of thousands, of love songs out there, I wonder which one is your favourite. There’s something so beautiful, so wondrous about love isn’t there? To love and to be loved, I just don’t think there’s anything that tops that.

To have that connection with someone where something good happens in your life you can’t wait to pick up the phone and share that. Where something bad happens you can’t wait to share that with them too. It’s that deep connection, that bond, that’s what makes the world go round, right?

But as many love songs that there are out there, there are also plenty of love lost songs. ‘James Blunt’s – Goodbye My Lover’ I think is one of the most touching ones on the planet, if you haven’t heard it have a listen. There is great tragedy when a relationship of great love is broken.

We talked recently on the program about the divorce statistics but behind each statistic, behind each divorce lies incredible tragedy, the deep hurt of a broken relationship. It’s interesting what Jesus said about the marriage relationship as He quotes the Book of Genesis, Matthew chapter 19 verses 3 to 6:

Some Pharisee’s came to Him to test Him and they said, ‘is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ Jesus answered, ‘have you not read that the one who made them in the very beginning made them male and female and said ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh?’   So they are no longer two but one flesh therefore what God has joined together let no one separate.

It’s this idea that when a man marries a woman they become one flesh, they become one unit in a relationship of love and intimacy that mirrors the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And when you tear apart what God has joined together is the most incredibly painful thing that you could ever imagine.

We’re talking in this series about love, what love is. In fact that’s the name of the series Love Is because love is so much more than romantic crooning of love songs, love is so much more than romance and sex, as wonderful and essential as those things are in a marriage relationship, love goes much wider than marriage to family and yes to friends. You and I can show love to a work colleague, to a neighbour, to a member of our local soccer club, love has a place in every relationship.

Yesterday on the program we took a look at one of the most power packed verses in the Bible, it’s a verse that punches way above its weight, way above the very few words that it uses, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 7:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

It talks about a love that doesn’t give up, a love that bears all things, believes and hopes all things and above all endures all things as much as that endurance always hurts. At this point I want to take a look at the three types of love spoken about in the New Testament, there are three Greek words used for love.

The first one is eros from which we get the word erotic; it speaks of physical intimacy and sexual love. The second one is phileo from which we get words like filial, it speaks of the love between friends or siblings and the third one is the word agape or agape however you’d like to say it.

Now I want to take you to a very clear definition of what this word agape actually means because that’s the word used here in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, that’s the sort of love that we’re talking about here. Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. It’s the highest of the three types of love spoken about in the New Testament. It perfectly describes the love of God, the love He has for us by sending Jesus to that cross to pay for our sins so that we can have a new life, a resurrection life, being born again to live with Him for all eternity.

Selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. That’s powerful isn’t it? And the very next verse after 1 Corinthians 13 verse 7 that we just read seals the deal in terms of what that sort of love means.

Love never ends.

It’s so easy to want to give up on love when the going gets tough, when love stops being a feeling and becomes a tough decision that we have to make every day. It’s easy to love someone when the going is good, they’re being nice to us, they respond to us, they treat us the way we want to be treated, that’s easy but that’s not the way that love is all the time.

Imperfect people which is pretty much, well let me see, that would be 100% of the people out there. Imperfect people are so hard to love. We so want to give up loving them sometimes, we start by hardening our hearts against them to protect ourselves then we start by reliving their faults over and over again in our minds which only hardens our hearts more.

Then we start imagining, no it’s more than that, it’s dreaming about a life without them then sadly people just walk away from that love. But God’s love never ends and that’s the sort of love He’s calling me and you to, the sort that bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things and endures all things. The sort of love that never ever, ever ends no matter what.

I don’t know but my hunch is that there’s a relationship in your life right now, a relationship that’s supposed to be filled with love that you may want to walk away from, a relationship where you’re fed up and you’ve just had enough, where you’ve lost hope and it’s right into that situation that I believe the Lord is speaking today, right into that difficult place. I just believe with all my heart that He wants to write these words onto your heart.

Love never ends.

Don’t give up.

How many times have you had to go to God and ask for His forgiveness through what Jesus did for you? Has He ever not forgiven you? Has He ever said to you ‘nup, that’s it, I’ve had enough of you, you’ve just hurt me one too many times, I don’t think you are ever going to change, I don’t think I can put up with you anymore, I’ve just had enough of you, I’m out of here.’

Has He ever said that to you? No. Every time you turn back to Him He rejoices like the father of the prodigal son who returned when the prodigal son came to his senses, Luke chapter 15 verse 20:

He set off and went to his father but while he was still far off his father saw him and was filled with compassion and ran out and threw his arms around him and kissed him.

That’s God’s love for you. That’s what it looks like and it’s that same love that His Holy Spirit would pour into your heart for the people around you. So when the person you love hurts you, offends you, disappoints you, it won’t feel anymore like it’s about you. Instead the love of God for that person will ache in your heart, the same love that God has for you will be the love, the unconditional love, the never ending love with which you will love them. The love that never ends.

Love, as they say, is what makes the world go round but as I look around the world whilst yes there is obvious love between family members and other people and sure there are some great missional and humanitarian initiatives afoot, there’s no doubt about that, but man there is a lot of hatred as well isn’t there.

Hatred is, well it’s rather a strong word isn’t it? But then again according to Wikipedia there are at least fifty four armed conflicts underway in the world just at the moment, so yeah there’s more than enough hatred to go around. But maybe in your everyday life hatred doesn’t quite fit. You perhaps don’t necessarily hate anyone, I know I don’t, so let’s now step it down to a systematised institutionalised self interest.

Now that’s a bit long winded and high faulting, so what do I mean? Well all the clothes you buy and chances are the majority of your clothes that you buy and wear, not all but the majority, were made in a sweatshop in a developing country where the workers face harsh and dangerous conditions. Some countries even have designated zones where labour laws are suspended and people live like battery hens to produce the well known brands that we wear not to mention the smart phones and tablets that we use.

Well Berni, you might say, I can’t help that. It’s not that I want to exploit those people, it’s just how things are; I can’t change them. Well fair enough. So let’s drill down and get even closer to home. Think about your attitudes and behaviours towards people at work. Many people work in a competitive environment where you not only have to succeed but you have to be seen to succeed to get ahead.

You get up in the morning, you shower, breakfast, then it’s off for the commute, struggling through the traffic, honking your horn at that selfish moron who won’t let you merge lanes. Or perhaps it’s the train or bus and everyone just jostles for a seat and squeezes on and takes your personal space away. By the time you get to work you’re frazzled, you’re in no mood for that incompetent idiot who’s your boss so you join the gossip in the tea room, you complain about this and that.

Does any of that sound even vaguely familiar? And then by the time you get home you’re snapping at your wife or your husband or the kids, you feel like kicking the dog in the head instead of patting him, right maybe I’m taking that metaphor just a bit far but you get my point. Be it at the geo-political level, the economic level or the personal level there’s a whole lot of room for us to live out a whole lot more love than we do today, would you agree?

Growing in this area of love is something that would make such a difference in the world, in our own lives, in the lives of those whom we love, in those who we work with, our whole circle of influence.

I want to take you back now to the central Scripture that we’ve been looking at in this series. Let me read it to you again and presuming that you’re not driving at the moment or operating heavy machinery, just close your eyes and soak it in, think about what God’s saying in the context of the love that you try and live out in your life, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 1 to 13:

If I speak of the tongues of mortals and of angels but I don’t have love I am just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and have all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to move mountains but I do not have love I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. Love isn’t envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, it doesn’t insist on its own way, it’s not irritable or resentful. It doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing but it rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

Love never ends but as for prophecies, they’ll come to an end. As for tongues they will cease. As for knowledge it will come to an end for we know only in part and we prophecy only in part but when the complete comes the partial will come to an end.

When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child but when I became an adult I put an end to childish ways. For now we see as in a mirror, dimly but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part then I will know fully even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope and love abide, these three but the greatest of these is love.

Yeah at the end of the day there’s these three things left, faith, well that’s super important right? Hope, you can’t keep going without hope but without a doubt the greatest one of those three is love because without love it doesn’t matter how clever, how talented, how sacrificial, how industrious we are, it ain’t worth anything. You know people like that, so do I, in fact I used to be one.

I’m thinking what my little corner of the world would look like if I picked up and owned and lived just these few verses minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day much more so than I do now. I’m thinking ‘what your little corner of the world would look like’ if you did the same?

Love is patient, love is kind. Love isn’t envious, it’s not boastful or arrogant or rude. It doesn’t insist on its own way. It’s not irritable, it’s not resentful, it doesn’t rejoice in wrong doing but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Darkness can never consume light, since after all, as a young Einstein pointed out to his atheist teacher, ‘darkness is simply the absence of light’. And so hatred, apathy, selfishness can never snuff out love because they are simply the absence of love. And selfish creatures that we are, the place where we discover an absolute abundance of love is God Himself, 1 John chapter 4 verses 7 and then 14 to 18:

Beloved let us love one another because love is from God. Everybody who loves is born of God and knows God.

And the nearer we draw to Jesus the more we get to know Him personally the more His love starts to change how we see things, how we feel about other people, how we behave towards other people.

See all too often we hear a message like this one and what we take away is ‘oh I have to love people more. Okay who am I not being nice to? What do I have to change? What are the opportunities to love them better?’ And whilst none of those are bad questions to ask if we think that that’s all it’s about, what we have to do, then we’ve completely missed the point.

Over the years I’ve had some people in my life who I’ve found incredibly frustrating, there are a couple of people who have betrayed me deeply and I used to think ‘I just have to change my attitude, I just have to change my behaviour’ but I don’t know if you’ve noticed, it’s pretty much impossible to do because before we can change on the outside something has to change in our hearts. Jesus in Matthew chapter 15 verses 17 to 20:

Do you not see that whatever goes into your mouth enters the stomach and goes out to the sewer but what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart and this is what defiles, for out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander. These are what defiles a person but to eat with unwashed hands that doesn’t defile.

In other words, if we want to change on the outside first we need, as we would say today, to have a change of heart and that’s exactly what God promises you, Ezekiel chapter 36 verses 26 and 27, have a listen:

A new heart I will give you, a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

Real, lasting, powerful change doesn’t happen when we work harder, it happens when God the Holy Spirit changes our hearts, when He replaces the heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Then all of a sudden living God’s way becomes a whole bunch easier, why don’t we get that?

Words are cheap aren’t they? If someone says ,”I love you” well that’s fantastic but it doesn’t prove a thing. The evidence of love is in what they do. It’s true of people and it’s true of God, I mean if God was put on trial being accused of loving you would there be enough evidence to convict Him?

Now, the Bible says that God is love, the Bible says that God loves us, you, me and every other homo sapiens on this earth. The Bible says that we’re created in His image and that despite our rebellion, despite the fact that the original image has been marred and disfigured almost beyond recognition, God still wants to restore us back into His original image, the Bible says.

Now at this point I know that more than a few people are thinking, “well the Bible says, whoopy do, big deal, come and look at my life, come and look at my lousy marriage, my rebellious children, my loneliness, my pain, my financial hardship, the losses I’ve been through, the complete lack of hope that I have for the future, come and look at that and then tell me what the Bible says.”

And if you relate to any of that, just a bit of that, then today I want to share some good news with you, I want to put God’s love under a microscope for you. Let’s make like we’re in a court of law in a trial that accuses God of loving us; the question I want to answer here is this, ‘is there enough evidence to convict Him?’

Now please don’t write in or email or call, I don’t mean that disrespectfully in any way. I simply want us to see what the evidence tells us as to whether God loves us or not.

So where do you begin? Well let’s begin at the beginning, let’s take a look, Genesis chapter 1 verses 26 to 31:

And God said ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind, cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind’ and it was so, God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind and God saw that it was good.

Then God said, ‘let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created human kind in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.

And God blessed them and God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’

God said, ‘see I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’ and it was so. God saw everything that He had made and indeed it was very good and there was evening and there was morning on the sixth day.

So God goes on to create this whole universe and then, the last act of Creation is He gives it all away to you and me, the whole cotton pickin’ lot. But it’s not just that, it’s not just an act of incredible generosity, it’s also an act of incredible vulnerability, not on our part but on God’s part because He creates us knowing full well that having given us free will, we would turn our backs on Him, we would rebel against Him.

In fact if you like that’s the whole story of the Old Testament in a nutshell, God’s people rebelling against God. The name Israel literally means ‘to struggle with God’ and through all the ups and downs of the Old Testament one thing becomes abundantly clear, it’s this, that in our relationship with God we will never ever, ever be able to hold up our end of the bargain, we’ll always fall short and that’s exactly what the Apostle Paul writes in the New Testament, Romans chapter 3 verse 23:

For there is no distinction since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And then Romans 6 verse 23:

For the wages of sin is death.

So, what to do, what to do, what to do, what to do? Now God has a dilemma. If He truly is a God of love does He put sinners to death? That is after all what it says here, I mean if He truly is a God of justice He has to follow through doesn’t He? So His response to this dilemma is a real test of His love for us. How can He have justice and love? So what’s His response? Well let’s look at the whole of Romans chapter 6 verse 23:

For the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The price of God’s justice is paid when Jesus, the Son of God, takes our sin on His shoulders, punished on the cross so that we could be forgiven. In fact when you think about it, this is the only possible way that God could have solved the dilemma, by meeting both the requirements of justice and love.

So forensically what does this tell us about God’s love? Well Jesus put it this way, John chapter 15 verses 12 and 13:

This is my Commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, than to lay down his life for his friends. You’re my friends if you do what I command.

Just the other night on the evening news where I live there was a story of a father who had died, drowned in the surf saving his son who was caught in a rip. Now you might expect a father to do that for his son right? After all it’s his son, he loves the son. If I had to put my life in harm’s way for my children I don’t think I’d even think a second about that, I love them, they’re my children.

The question however is would you put yourself in harm’s way for someone who’s treated you badly? Would you lay your life down for someone who’s rebelled against you, spoken badly of you, turned their backs on you? Well would you? Have a listen, Romans chapter 5 verses 6 to 8:

While you and I were still weak just at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, no perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die but God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

And that my friend, right there, is proof positive of God’s love for you. I know that things in your life may not be perfect in every department, I know that you may be suffering over this or that and I know, believe you me I know, I’ve been there, that life can sometimes look so bleak, so desperate that you can’t even see how you’re going to make it through until tomorrow.

But right in the middle of whatever it is that you’re going through at the moment, God has something to say to you today; through His Word He is saying, “I love you more than words could ever say, just look at my Son, look at how He suffered and died for you, that’s how much I love you, that’s what you’re worth to me.”

And you know it’s not until we feel loved that we can love other people. If you don’t feel secure in love you don’t have any love to give away. So many people are missing out on the abundant life that Jesus came to give them because they know about God, they just don’t know Him personally. And if that sounds like you then why not pray this prayer with me today.

Father God, I’ve heard about your love today, I’ve heard about Jesus, Jesus who died for me and rose again for me and I want to accept this Jesus as my Saviour and the Lord of my life. I want to experience for real this love that I’ve heard about today. So Lord please forgive me, please accept me just as I am, please fill me to overflowing with your Holy Spirit, and with your love. I ask you that in Jesus’ name. Amen

If you just prayed that prayer you are forgiven, you have been made whole and your life has just completely changed forever and ever and ever.