ITS A RELATIONSHIP
PART 4
PART 4
“…that you may KNOW…..the only true God and
Jesus Christ…” John 17:3
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| NOT FREE TO RESPOND |
God loves each of us and desires to
restore our “freedoms,” God gave mankind freedom, from the beginning, even
though he knew it could potentially lead them away from him, which is what
happened with Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve didn’t simply choose
between right and wrong per se, but they responded to Satan’s lies. Think about
it, God allowed Adam and Eve to “freely respond” to his truth about the tree of
life or Satan’s lies. God is in Control, but God is not controlling.
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| HOWEVER, GOD IS NOT CONTROLLING |
Never get used to hearing about
God’s love and never assume you’ve heard everything you need to hear about
God’s love, because you haven’t. If God’s love has become common to you; you
need to study it again.
Someone or something only becomes common
when you stop placing or seeing the VALUE of it or them. God is true love (1 John 4:8). God’s love is your most valuable
possession and without it, YOU HAVE NOTHING (1 Corinthians 13).
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| GODS LOVE |
Learn something about God’s love
every day. It’s rich, engulfing, majestic, holy and bestowed upon you
unconditionally from the depth of God’s heart.
There is NONE like God and there is
NO love greater than God’s. Let me give you a very brief synopsis of God’s
love.
God’s love covers over a lot of offenses.
His love is fully forgiving and doesn’t keep a record of another person’s
wrongs towards him.
God’s love is enduring. God’s love suffers long, because God
deeply desires to give you a chance to get it right with Him.
God’s love is faithful and loyal.
God’s love makes a sacrifice and therefore is costly.
God’s love continues, even if it does not receive anything in return.
God’s love does not come with a wage attachment, where you have to somehow earn
it.
It does not come with a partiality tag, where
you somehow have to be worthy of it. It does not come with a merit tag, where
somehow you have to be deserving of it.
God’s love is free towards the
recipient of it and will not demand anything in return.
God’s love won’t change, even if
the recipient changes, walks away, rejects it, follows after another, is unfaithful, offends, or totally forgets about His love altogether.
This is the kind of love God has
for you. God will never go against his nature of Divine Love.
Love is who God is at the core of
His being. If there were spiritual DNA, love would be God’s DNA.
Further, God’s ways of loving are
not our ways of loving and His thoughts of love are not our thoughts of love.
God’s ways of loving are higher than your ways of loving.
God is always pursuing man and man
is too often running away with his or her idols and adulteries.
Mankind’s reasons for allowing
distance between them and God are no different than that of Adam and Eve’s. It
is a great possibility that you have been deceived by the enemy too and have
“fallen away” from the loving God.
The further away you are from God,
the easier it is for the enemy to broaden the distance in the YADA
relationship.
God loves you so much, even when
you blame him for all the evil in the world and participate in the evil
yourself.
God loves you, even when your ways
move you away from him and you shut him completely out of your life. Ouch. God
would still say to the backsliding sinner that even though you betrayed me; if
you want another chance; I will heal your unfaithfulness (Hosea 14: 4).
God never gives you up on loving
you. In other words, God doesn’t stop caring for you ever, but he does yield to
your stubborn desire to willfully sin.
Nothing hurts worse than someone saying they love you, yet constantly choosing something or someone before you. God’s
love will still continue and endure the apostasy of backsliders (Hosea 14:4).
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| I CREATED EVIL |
Let me explain this a little as I
understood it. After people have raised their children, eventually they become
independent of their parent’s moral teachings.
If they choose sin and reject good;
the grown child will have to take responsibility for whatever they do and the
only thing parents can honestly say is, “I
created that child.”
The grown child fell away from the
moral teachings they had been taught and now they must suffer the consequences.
They used their independence to
stray away from the safeguard of their parent’s moral teachings. The same thing
happens when God’s children stray away from the safeguard of his Word and holy
teachings.
Thus, the further you are away from
God’s righteous teachings, the further away you are from God’s protective care.
When grown, human children stray
from their moral upbringing sometimes the parents are blamed; just like people
blame God for the evils of the world. However, the right perception is
everything.
Evil is not a person or thing; it
is the absence of God. Just like
darkness is the absence of light and
cold is the absence of heat. Evil is
the absence of God.
At one time, Adam and Eve had the
freedom to be good, pure, and holy and was full of the Spirit of liberty. There
was no need to live independent of God’s ways.
Adam and Eve’s freedoms led them to
respond to God’s holy ways until they responded independently to Satan’s ways
instead. Therefore, God takes responsibility for creating evil since he created
MANKIND.
God created mankind whose “freedom to
respond” distanced them from him and from his presence. Evil is the absence
of God.
Adam and Eve were originally
created to “freely respond” to both the natural and supernatural life around
them.
When you accept Christ as Lord and
Savior your “ability to respond” freely to ALL of life is restored.
God wants you to freely respond to
him out of love and not out of force, or obligation, or legalism.
Love that flows when a person
freely and willfully responds to you is authentic. Or would you want someone to
love you out of obligation, force, or duty?
That’s why God restores, opens, and
frees your ability to respond and thus frees your will. Now you have” free will”.
A “free will” that can respond to
the natural and supernatural world. It
once was easy to do both, but now it’s a challenge to respond to the
supernatural realm of God. Thus true "free will" sets you apart from all other peoples because now you can respond to holiness.
Believers have the freedom right now to respond to God and the
supernatural realm through faith or they can remain limited to just the natural
realm.
How have you started responding to
God’s holiness or are you still responding to ongoing sin? Are you distance
from God or are you in a YADA relationship?
If God has restored your ability to
respond freely to his truth, like Lydia, then it’s YOU and not God creating the
distance. A woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple
fabrics, a worshiper of God, was listening; and the Lord opened her heart to
respond to the things spoken by Paul” (Acts 14:16).
It is easy to judge God for
everything that goes wrong in life, but you are finite and God is infinite. You
can’t always understand his supernatural, loving, and divine ways “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom
and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past
finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his
counsellor?” (Romans 11:33-34).
God does things from a holy
perspective and not a human one. Many things God does makes no sense to the
human understanding.
A relationship with God will always
take you BEYOND human understanding. God does not want his relationship with
you to be limited by human, finite understanding. The bible says, “Trust in and rely confidently on the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. In all your ways know and acknowledge and recognize Him, And He will make your paths straight and smooth [removing obstacles that block your way]” (Proverbs 3:5-6).
When God makes
no “human” sense Jesus says, “…..don’t be
afraid….only believe” (Mark 5:36).
When God works
in your life or answers you, your human understanding can often limit or hinder
you if you allow it to. “Now
to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that
works within us”
(Ephesians 3:20).
Sometimes you must,
“…only
believe” (Mark 5:36). And
except “…his ways[are]…
past finding out…” (Romans 11:33-34).
It takes faith. You won’t always
humanly understand his holy ways or what he may have prepared up for you. “But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who
love Him.” (1
Corinthians 2:9).
Everything God does is holy and
righteous whether you agree or not. Therefore, if God allowed for mankind to freely
respond or answer life as he/she chooses, it is God’s prerogative and no one
elses.
Even though God says he created
evil; he created YOU. You are not evil per se, but your ability to respond to
life often exposes an evil thinking heart; (…out of the heart come evil thoughts… (Matthew 15:19).
Evil is not a person or a thing; it
is the absence of God. An evil heart
is absent of God.
Adam and Eve ate the apple, the
relationship between them and God changed, and immediately their “eyes were opened,” most likely to his ABSENCE (Genesis 3:7).
Therefore, like God said, they died
spiritually immediately (Genesis 2:17). As you can see, immediate death was not
the physical death where the soul is separated from the body, but was the
spiritual death where the “Holy Spirit” is separated from the body and soul.
Adam and Eve had a body, soul, and
spirit, but their spirit died. They were still created
in God’s “image”, but were now
corrupted and marred by sin and fell short of the glory of God (his Holy
Spirit) (Genesis 1:26-27; Romans 3:23). All humanity is born with the same
problem.
EXCERPT FROM THE CHAPTER
" ITS A RELATIONSHIP"
" ITS A RELATIONSHIP"
FROM TRANSFORMING LOVE
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