Archives for March 2024

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The scriptures teach that God is love (1 John 4:8) and that salvation’s plan, in all its parts, is the fruit of that love. God did not give His Son to die for us, that He might love us; but He loved us and, because of that love, He sacrificed His Son for us.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8 NIV

You might have been told that God only loves you because of Jesus. But this is not true nor biblical! God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit loved you and agreed on the plan of salvation. The trinity is always unified in everything. God’s love toward us, even when we were sinners, was sufficiently intense to cause Him to give up His Son Jesus to death. Jesus laid down His life willingly (John 10:18; 1 John 3:16). We are not told just when this love began to exist, but it is written:

But he alone is God, and who can oppose him? God does as he pleases.
He is always the same and never makes dark shadows by changing.

Job 23:13; James 1:17 CEV

Therefore, God who is love, has loved us as long as He has been what He is now; but, if He is unchangeable, we cannot say He ever began to love us. Therefore, God’s gifts, Jesus and the salvation inseparably joined to Jesus, are the fruits of God’s everlasting love. But not only is it true that God’s love comes before the giving of Christ as a Redeemer, but it also produces our delivery from sin.

But God was merciful! We were dead because of our sins, but God loved us so much he made us alive with Christ, and God’s gift of undeserved grace is what saves you.

Ephesians 2:4-5 CEV

We are not regenerated and saved, and therefore loved, but loved, and therefore regenerated and saved.

We love Him because he first loved us. God’s love to us has “causative power,” and produces in us love for God. “Love (in us) is of God,” and “He that loves is born of God.” The thought that God loved us before the world began is incomprehensible; yet we have seen that God’s gift of Jesus is a fruit of that love. As grace was given to us in Christ before the world began, so we know that God loved us before the world began. Therefore, there is nothing older than God’s love for us. Thousands of years have come and gone, and yet God’s love exists and bears the most precious fruit.

God’s Love is Not Fickle

No saint can say that he has loved God and obeyed Him, and that God loved him as a consequence; but certainly God loved us, and our loving Him and obeying Him is a fruit of that love.

You cannot believe that God’s love is directed by perfect wisdom, is given fully to us, and that it could possibly be removed at some point. For instance: He loves you today; His perfect wisdom comprehends not only what you are now, but what you ever will be; therefore, he is not disappointed in what He loves. You never can become worse than He knows you will be; and, in fact, He loved you while you were dead in sin, and certainly you can never be worse than dead in sin. Therefore, to say that God will cease to love you is to reject His wisdom, and charge him with misplacing His love, and attribute changeableness to Him.

But, if it is argued that God loves character, and that He loves persons only as they produce that character, we would answer, that every grace of the Christian is produced in him by the Lord; and it is simple nonsense to say that God clothes His people with every benefit of the cross, and then loves them only because of that dress. Instead, He loved us first and then saved us.

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

Galatians 5:22-23 NLT

For those who believe in God, He provides the fruit of love in their hearts, so that they can return the love. Therefore, He loves none of us for our good character, but our good character grows out of His love for us. If He had not loved us, given His Son to die for us, regenerated us, and worked in us all that makes up the difference between our present selves and former selves, we could never have good character.

You cannot conceive of an immutable God, with mutable, changeable love, affectionately embracing believers today, and tomorrow casting them down to hell; today calling one an heir of Heaven, beholding his name written in the book of life, and tomorrow erasing that name and disinheriting that heir. The Bible gives no account of such a God; neither do we, poor, sinful, erring beings, need such a God.

God’s Love is Stronger than a Parent’s Love

Have you never thought of the tenderness of a parent’s love toward a prodigal son or daughter? Though that child goes away in sin and disgrace, and others have forsaken and cast the child out of their hearts, yet that good father never stops loving the child, and that mother wets her pillow with tears, as she thinks, in the stillness of the night, of her erring child; and they both lift their petitions to God, to save the wanderer.

Few children know how much parents love them, till the parents are cold in death; so, few Christians know how much God loves them, and how carefully He watches them. We admire pure, disinterested love in parents (love from God for their child); love that floods cannot sweep away; that will follow their offspring as long as life lasts; love unchangeable, unalterable, constant.

Could such a high, noble, and perfect love be possible for parents, and yet God is destitute of it? Should we measure the perfection of creature love by this standard, and throw it aside as too glorious for God?

If God’s love for His children is fickle, changeable, dependent on changing circumstances, alternately given and taken away, then, in my opinion, God’s love is imperfect, and therefore He is imperfect. But if God loves those whom He loves eternally, infinitely, and perfectly, then is His love directed in wisdom, and He is perfect; and one sweet thought here is, that the evidence that He loves me now, or ever did love me, is a certain, unalterable, and irreversible title to Heaven.

The Savior prays:

I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.

John 17:23 NLT

Jesus desires the world to know a great truth here: that as God loves the Son, so he loves His children. And a little further he says: “You loved me even before the world began!” (John 17:24 NLT). So, if God loves us as He loves His Son, and loved His Son before the foundation of the world, then He loved us before the foundation of the world. If the Son lives by the Father, so we shall live by the Son (John 6:57).

God Disciplines Those He Loves

It is for our profit that we are chastened, and not for our destruction. God says:

then I will punish their sin with the rod,
    and their disobedience with beating.
But I will never stop loving him
    nor fail to keep my promise to him.
No, I will not break my covenant;
    I will not take back a single word I said.

Psalm 89:32-34 NLT

And in Hebrews, He speaks:

And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins. If God doesn’t discipline you as he does all of his children, it means that you are illegitimate and are not really his children at all. No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way.

Hebrews 8:12; 12:8, 11 NLT

How delightful the thought that God never changes, and that, though we are prone to wander, God never forgets nor forsakes us. Our own experience will bear out this thought. We have left undone the things we should have done, and done many things we should not have done; yet God has not turned his back upon us, and we can sing:

“Oh, Lord, you never change;
But because I stray;
Lord, guide me by your Spirit,
And keep me in your way.”

The Christian may apply the following lines to himself:

“So close, so very close to God,
I cannot nearer be;
For, in the person of his Son,
I am as near as he.

So dear, so very dear to God,
More dear I cannot be;
The love with which he loves his Son,
Such is his love for me.

Why should I ever careful be,
Since such a God is mine?
He watches o’er me night and day,
And tells me, ‘Mine is thine.’”

A Mind at Perfect Peace

This is post 8 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
Image by Ginger Palmisano from Pixabay

Reading time: 4 minutes

What can motivate us to follow in Jesus’s footsteps? What helps us know we are okay to express our faith boldly? We can express gratitude for God’s tender care for us and Jesus’s example of suffering which ended with glory. As Jesus suffered and was glorified, so the same is true for us. We will suffer in this life but be glorified in the next.

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

1 Peter 1:6-7 NLT

When you review the whole history of the Savior in his life and death; his nights of care and prayer; his agonies in the garden; the stressful night he endured before his crucifixion; his despairing cry, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” (Matthew 27:46). Think how faithful he was to you; many nights alone in some cold mountain he persisted in solemn prayer to God. He suffered all this not for himself, but for you who were ruined. It was for you he toiled all his life of care — it was your miserable sins that crushed him in the garden.

Gratitude for God’s Attention to Detail

Oh, Christian! Christian! Remember with gratitude that you are not your own, but that you are bought with a price, and that price was the life of the Lord Jesus; therefore, glorify him in your body and spirit, which are his.

Make your home with Him. Tell your wants often to him in prayer, and when you are worried, tired, and distressed, cast all your care on him, for he cares for you. His all-seeing eye is always upon you, and he never will leave nor forsake you. He feeds the sparrows that have neither a barn nor a storehouse. There is not a living thing but that he keeps it, and why should we fear that he will not keep us? The very hairs of your head are numbered.

Again, we have been created in Christ unto good works, and these good works God has before ordained that we should walk in them. I am sure we should love God all the more and serve him all the better, when we feel that he is a fire around us and that he is engaged to save us, despite all our foes whether inside or outside of us.

Gratitude for Christ’s Example

Christ’s example motivates us. He pointed our feet in the way he would have us go. Yes, even more, he showed us by example the way.

There is gratitude even in a dog when you give him no more than a bone. Then let us think that we were poor, starved, rebellious dogs, who have been fed on the very flesh and blood of Christ, who has stooped to bind and heal all our wounds. When we were lost, poor, starving, and friendless, he hunted us from every place where we had wandered, took away all our grief and made our eyes overflow with tears of joy, astonished us with tokens of his wonderful love, forgiving, sweetly forgiving all our sins.

Dear reader, have you forsaken him, or left off following him? Are you tired of his service or company? Let me exhort you; I need it as much as you. Christians should never complain; why should servants complain when the Master complains not, though his suffering be greater than all the suffering of all his servants? Let us learn patience by looking at the sufferings of Christ. Homeless, often tired and wearied, and yet not a complaint escapes his lips — these are the best thoughts to stir us up to duty and not the fear of apostasy.

Instead of fear, we focus on gratitude for Jesus’s finished work and the assurance that our suffering provides as it confirms our faith.

This is post 7 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
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Reading time: 4 minutes

Whoever has God’s gift of grace, unmerited eternal life, can also have assurance that they will be in heaven because the Holy Spirit guides them into all truth. The true believer’s very nature is changed from being a slave to sin to being a slave to righteousness. Being a slave to righteousness does not mean that a true believer no longer sins, only that he is under grace, not the law.

Some people are against accepting the Bible’s teaching of eternal security because they think it allows (or encourages) genuine believers to continue in sin, putting their salvation in danger. Is it unsafe to set up the safety of saints in such strong terms because this will encourage them to be careless with their lives? If you feel that you are licensed to sin by the security that God has granted, you have not been rightly taught.

Believers are Under Grace Not Under the Law

Believers will sin less over time because they are under grace; they have been set free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:1-2). Note that the Bible does not specify an exact time length that the believer must demonstrate this, except a lifetime.

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

Romans 6:1-2 ESV

Here, we have this objection named in the scriptures, showing that it was brought against the apostles–that their doctrines suggested carelessness and living in sin. The fact that such an objection was brought against them is evidence that there was something in their preaching that led many to think that they did not believe in obedience to God. But let us hear Paul’s reply that highlights the new nature of believers. How can we who died to sin still live in it? This plainly shows that the Christian is dead to sin and that this is the reason why he does and should obey God. He has lost his delight in sin; he is dead to it.

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

Romans 6:14-15; 3:8 ESV

Believers are far removed from the law with its curse and are under grace. They do not do evil to bring about good! Who can doubt from these passages that the apostles taught that salvation was wholly of grace, and not in any degree of works? We see now that people who teach that possessors of salvation are free, are charged and slandered just as Paul was in his day.

For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.

1 Peter 2:15-16 ESV

These foolish men say, “If my works can neither make nor keep me holy, I would not care how I live. I would enjoy the pleasures of sin all the time.” But God’s will is that His people will silence such nonsense by a godly life–showing to the world that we are the sons of God and that it is our highest pleasure to obey him–that we feel grateful to him for what he has done for us in the past. Yes, even more, that sin has become exceeding sinful to us, so that we flee from and dread it as poison.

Grace is a More Powerful Motivator Than Fear

God’s grace grants us the precious gift of eternal life that we don’t deserve and cannot earn. We have found that all misery was brought by sin, and all our happiness is the hope of being delivered from sin. The scripture exhortation is “by the mercies of God” not by the fear of hell or apostasy.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Romans 12:1 ESV

Your greatest incentive to obedience is to think of all that Christ has done for you on the cross: his groans and death. If this will not prompt you, it is not worthwhile to threaten you with “falling from grace.” Mercy is more powerful than fear. Love drives out fear (1 John 4:18).

So, we believers can see that God’s gift of eternal life, and the security of it, are more than worth our obedience; we can delight in obedience, with thanksgiving, because of it. Look now to the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ’s love and guide you into all truth. Let nothing but His love motivate you to do the good works that God has planned in advance for you to do.

This is post 6 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
Image by Anja from Pixabay

Reading time: 4 minutes

Physical birth is a passive process for the one being born. No one takes credit for being born. The same is true of our spiritual birth. We are not asked to be brought into the physical world or the spiritual kingdom of God but are summoned by God. God causes our spiritual birth.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

1 Peter 1:3-5 ESV

God Wills New Birth

In John 3, the Savior tells Nicodemus that he must be born again and that without it he could neither see nor enter the kingdom of God. New birth is not of the will of the flesh or man, but it is of God.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:12-13 ESV

Spiritual birth is of the Spirit and the Spirit acts however the Spirit pleases; it elevates one to be a son of God. He can say, Abba, Father! He is an heir of God, and a joint heir with Christ (Romans 8:15-16). Do not forget it; he is a joint heir with Christ. He is a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Now, being born from above by God’s will, God guards us by His power. Jesus holds us securely. The evil one cannot remove our salvation. We have eternal life.

God Keeps Us Safe Because We are His Children

For every child of God defeats this evil world. We know that God’s children do not make a practice of sinning, for God’s Son holds them securely, and the evil one cannot touch them.

1 John 5:4, 18 NLT

The eternal God is his keeper; and more, he keeps him as the apple of his eye, and “the evil one cannot touch them.” God’s children have overcome the world “because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world” (1 John 4:4 NLT).

Oh, to know for sure that we have this wonderful and secure plan of salvation — to feel that the strong arm of Jehovah is around me as a tender husband and that I am a plant of his own planting, that shall never be rooted up. If such thoughts as these would not encourage and comfort his poor, tried ones of earth, then I confess I am a stranger to all the sweets of the gospel.

David, in his affliction, would say:

Wondrously show your steadfast love, O Savior of those who seek refuge from their adversaries at your right hand. Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.

Psalm 17:7-8 ESV

If David needed such a Savior, can we do with less than this? If he felt his need to be kept, we also need it. We, “who by God’s power, are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:5 ESV). It is marvelous loving kindness in our God to be so intent on saving us.

We have evil adversaries, but thankfully, God who is all-powerful, justifies and Jesus intercedes for us. Therefore, no one can overpower Him to remove us from His grasp and kill us with condemnation (Romans 8:1, 33-34).

New birth is a miraculous transformation from spiritual death to life. Only God’s power is capable of creating us anew, and keeping us safe from all harm.

This is post 5 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
Image by wendy CORNIQUET from Pixabay