What Does It Mean to Be Loved by God?
- Message Excerpt by
- Topic: The Love of God
Audio Transcript
Here’s a test. Are you ready? Just a one question test to see whether or not you know what it is to be loved by God, whether or not you know what it is to experience the love of God in your life. Because my generation has sold you a bill of goods on what that means. We have told you in a thousand ways that to be loved by God is to be made much of.
Some of you can’t even conceive of another definition of love than to be made much of. God loves me? He makes much of me. Now here’s the test: Do you feel more loved by God when he makes much of you, or when he, at the cost of his Son’s life, gives you the ability to enjoy making much of him forever?
“God’s love for sinners is not his making much of us, but his graciously freeing and empowering us to enjoy making much of him.”
I’m going to state the test question again, and you do the answering in your heart. Then you’ll know whether you have to experience a Copernican revolution at OneDay 2003.
Do you feel more loved by God when he makes much of you, or do you feel more loved by God when he undertakes through the cross in the Holy Spirit to enable you to experience a kind of inner revolution that you enjoy making much of them forever? That’s the test question for this generation. My generation failed it. We still do.
We’re still delivering the wrong books, the wrong sermons, the wrong message to this generation. “It’s all about me, all about my value.” We stand before the holy cross of God Almighty and take it as an echo of my worth, instead of as an echo of the horror of demeaning the worth of God — which is what sin is — and which is why the cross was necessary.
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