God is our Father. Before giving or loving does a good parent ask, "Does my child deserve this love I am about to show? Does my child deserve this gift I am about to give?" No! Love gives because love loves. Love doesn't judge to evaluate reward. Love just loves.
If you say to yourself, "I'm going to love them even though they don't deserve it." You aren't loving them, you are judging them, judging them as undeserving & unworthy based on how they've behaved. You are dehumanizing them. You are ignoring who their Father is.
It is not more loving to grittingly ignore a grudge. It is more loving to never take up a grudge to begin with. It is not more loving to forgive. It is more loving to never take offense, to never need to forgive except for the sake of the other person's peace of mind.
"Love does not take into account wrongs suffered!"
God never forgave you because He was never angry or offended at you to begin with. God is love & God does not take into account wrongs suffered! The word that has been translated as forgive from both the Hebrew & the Greek means "to remove burden." It does not mean, as our English word forgive means, "to renounce anger, to stop resenting, to let go of a grudge, to stop blaming."
God has no mercy for you! People say mercy is "not getting what you deserve" presuming you deserve bad. Presuming that God really wants to hurt you but chooses not to. The word translated as mercy in the Hebrew means "loving kindness" & in the Greek means "compassion."
Throw away the word "mercy" because it does not represent your Father's heart towards you. God is not "merciful" towards you. He does not want to harm you or pay you back for your wrongdoing!
So often we take scriptures like "while we were still sinners Christ died for us" & think to ourselves "see He was really mad at us but in His love He begrudgingly got over it." But those scriptures aren't meant to give us the picture of "God saved us even though our actions made Him not want to." They are meant to show us that "God saved us, but not from Himself, because He amazingly never held the fact that we were sinners against us."
To question whether someone deserves something is to question their worth, to JUDGE their worth. If you judge someone undeserving of love you are saying they are unworthy of love. That sin or law keeping or good behavior is what determines a person's value. But oh my brothers & sisters how far from the truth that is!
You don't determine (judge) your newborn's worth based on her or his behavior. You don't look at your child napping & say to yourself, "This child doesn't deserve my love." That child has your love because you are their parent. You aren't looking at them through the lens of sin or law keeping or performance. You are looking at them through the EYES of a father or a mother.
Our Father only has FATHER'S EYES. He doesn't wear glasses because He doesn't believe lies.
God our Father did not send Jesus to judge the world, the world judges itself. It condemns itself by refusing to believe in the light of His love. Jesus came to save the world from the lie that God doesn't love you for you as a good Father would.
It branches from the original lie in the garden, "It is good to know evil." God's love for us surpasses all knowledge. The fullness of His love is beyond our imagination. So when we try to wrap our minds around good & evil we believe we are evil & that God thinks we are evil too because we struggle to grasp a love that does not take evil into account.
Evil is simple, it is obvious when things fall apart but it is not obvious how things are put together. So when we choose to know good & evil we choose the power to judge ourselves & others. But love doesn't judge, love just loves. Sometimes love protects with consequences. Sometimes love protects from consequences.
Children as their lives begin cannot fathom the depths of their parents love for them. But they get to experience that love as their lives unfold.
The enemy wants us to confuse acts of God's protection for acts of God's poor perception of us. God sought to protect Adam & Eve from the tree of knowledge of good & evil but Satan twisted it saying, "God's not trying to protect you. God is holding out on you. He says you don't deserve to know what He knows. He doesn't love you enough to tell you everything He knows. But you can bypass Him & the long process of learning from Him in a relationship & just eat from the tree. You won't surely die!"
And that is Satan's first lie to all of us in our youthful ignorance, "Your parents aren't protecting you. They are holding out on you." And that flips protection upside down, from love to no love. This is Satan's goal: to disempower our belief & trust in God's love for us.
In religion Satan says, "God doesn't love you for you, you are unworthy of His love. He loves you for Himself to bring Him glory & praise Him & serve Him as a slave."
In failure & shame & guilt Satan says, "God doesn't love you for you, you are unworthy of His love. His love for you is based on what you can do for Him. You know how it goes, everyone is like that. But He's God so He gets to make the loftiest demands."
In pride Satan says, "God loves you because you are so good at what you do (He doesn't love you for you). Look at those people. Doesn't it make you mad that they don't measure up?"
The truth is GOD LOVES YOU FOR YOU. Not because He "has to" because He is love. But because He wants to so deeply that He is too enthralled with you to EVER choose anything but love.
So let's stop talking about God like we're scientists dissecting his corpse, labeling His attributes. Let's be caught into our Father's arms & listen to His heartbeat. You are His special child & He couldn't love you any more or love you any less. But you get to experience more & more of His love today, tomorrow, & forever.
"The reason God saved us & made us alive together with Jesus is so that throughout eternity He can show us the super-abounding wealth of His love & kindness toward us." (Ephesians 2:4-7)
My interpretation of the `fall of man` is the snake convinced Eve to believe she was not like God. Thus I define sin as believing the wrong things about your self and thereby doubt your self, doubt how God created you, that you're not good enough, that you lack, that there's something wrong with you. Because you believe that you will act against your best interests and make life miserable for your self and others.
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