Good morning.
I bring you greetings from the Deep South. The saints in Dothan send their love, their greetings, and their appreciation for all the sacrifices you folks up here have made over the years to have a conference that encourages these little groups like us out in the boondocks. We get to come and get refreshed, encouraged, and challenged each year. So I bring you our greetings and our thanksgiving with a sincere heart.
You’ll pardon me for not turning too much. I’ve found that, with modern technology, I can actually print stuff out big enough to read, so I’ll be reading from my page instead of turning in the Bible. I ask you to be gracious there.
Let’s turn to 1 John 4, reading verses 7 and 8.
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God;
and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God;
for God is love.
It was pointed out to me earlier this morning that I seem to have a recurring theme when I come here: love. Last time—which I did not remember, I must confess—I shared on faith, hope, and love. I remember now that the emphasis was that love is the greatest of these, because love will always bring us to our Redeemer, Who will then fill us with faith and hope.
This morning, we want to look at the fact that God’s character is love, how that love is expressed toward the world, and the impact it should be having in us.
I want to do this by looking at three groups of people that we all know God loves:
Perhaps, by looking at His love for these three groups, we’ll be able to understand a bit what God’s love in us should look like.
There are a lot of verses, and if you want to turn with me quickly, feel free to; but I’m going to move through them fairly quickly.
Obviously, John 3:16:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life.
Is there a Scripture more known, more quoted, more memorized, than this passage of God’s love for a lost and dying world? Is there one that should draw our hearts to our Redeemer any more deeply, any more quickly?
So let’s go to Him for a moment and thank Him for this rich love.
Father, how thankful we are that You have so loved us that You gave Your Son for us. Help us to remember that this morning. As we consider Your love, wash us in Your love. Overwhelm us, Lord Jesus, with Your love this morning. Make it real. Make it palpable. Help us to know the very feeling of Your love this morning: that You have chosen us and given Your Son, that we might be redeemed to You.
So we thank You, and we look to You to help us this morning in Your Word. In Christ’s name, amen.
Romans 5:8:
But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Titus 3:3-7:
For we ourselves also were sometime foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another.
But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared,
not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;
which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour;
that being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Why does God love sinners so much? I mean, sinners to us are just too much trouble, aren’t they? They’re dirty people. They’re sinful people. They do things we don’t do. They go places we don’t go. They love things we don’t love.
Why does God love sinners so very, very much that He would give His Son for them?
It’s because His creation is a love story. He created those sinners—we sinners—because of His love. He didn’t create mankind because He needed another toy to play with. God’s not some bored heavenly cat that needs another mouse to swat at.
And He didn’t need a great gathering of automatons, of robots, that He could order around and have clean up the earth for Him.
God created out of love, to have fellowship—to have a being created in His own image with whom He could fellowship, and to whom He could express the very great nature of His love.
When He created man, man was not a sinner.
God loves sinners so much because He knows what we were created for in the beginning, what we can be. And He is redeeming us back. His redemption is the story of His love for His creation. He is buying it back to Himself.
God loves sinners because He created sinners as holy men, to be loved of God and to love God.
We have this terrible, terrible blindness. We can no longer see over our shoulder and remember from whence we have come.
It’s wonderful that God is blind and does not remember our sins, and puts them away from Him as far as the east is from the west. It is a wonderful thing that there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus for us who are believers, that we can stand and never look over our shoulder and say, “Oh, that sin that I’ve already repented of is going to catch me and undo me before my Father.”
It’s a settled issue. It has been dealt with in the blood of Jesus. In the repentance of your own heart, it has been put away.
But I wonder sometimes if we fail to remember how much has been put away on our behalf. God loves sinners, of which we come. That’s where we came from.
God is full of love, that He would give His only Son, that He would make the choice between His Son and lost mankind, and say, “I’m willing to let My Son suffer so great a price to redeem these lost and sinful men.”
There’s nothing in sinners worthy of God’s love. There’s nothing in those who are lost and have yet to repent that commands the price paid for them—paid for us. But the price is paid.
The depth of God’s love will never be fathomable to the human mind and heart. We will never understand it fully. I will never be able to conceive how He could choose me, as sorry and wretched as I was; or how He could choose you, who grew up in a wonderful home and never did the things I did, and yet closed your heart to your Saviour.
How could He get past what we were to what we should be and could be?
I’ll never understand it fully. Thanks be to God that, in His graciousness, He gives us the faith to believe what we cannot understand.
God loves sinful man with all His heart. He gave His only begotten Son that they might know their Father. How God loves sinners! He holds nothing back. He has reserved nothing in heaven that is too precious to give for the redemption of mankind, because He gave His Son on the cross. No price could have been greater.
But God not only loves these awful sinners with whom we have nothing to do. God loves me. And He loves you. Not us—me and you.
He knows you individually, and He loves you individually. So basic. So simple. We all know it. This isn’t a message to be given. I mean, every one of us understands this: God loves me.
So why is it that this is one of the most recurring themes in the Word of God? Because God knows how very desperately I need Him to love me. I need Him to care for me. You need Him to love you. You need to know He loves you.
We are in a world that will joyfully destroy us if it has opportunity. We need the love of God in our lives.
John 15:9:
As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you: continue ye in My love.
Ephesians 2:4-7:
But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us,
even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)
and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:
that in the ages to come He might shew the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.
John 13:1:
Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.
I am not worthy of such love. I did not care for such love. And I will fail God’s never-ceasing love time and time again.
You are not worthy that the very Son of God should shed His blood for you. And you did not, before you were saved—and many of us, even after we’re saved, do not—care for the love of God.
We all will certainly fail that love at times in our life. Yet He loves me.
He loved me first. We love Him, remember, because He first loved us. He loves me unconditionally. While I was yet in my sins, Christ died for me. He loves me with purpose, because He has made me to sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.
He loves me enough to risk losing me.
Hebrews 12:6:
For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.
And He loves me to the very end.
God’s love is not afraid of failure. He has no thought that His love will not be sufficient to see you all the way through to the end. He knows the very character and quality of His own love, and He has made the choice that He will do whatever is required to bring you through to sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.
He holds nothing back. In Christ Jesus, all that pertains to life and godliness we have. His love does not come up short in any area.
Before we knew Him, He loved us. Since we’ve come to know Him, He loves us. When we fail Him, He loves us enough to bring the whirlwind that you’ve heard about last weekend—to bring the circumstances necessary to change you and to change me, and to transform us into the very image of His Son—knowing that He risks losing the very one He loves.
It is amazingly sad to me that there are so many who know and experience God’s love, and yet, when times become difficult, something breaks inside of them and they walk away from the love that would sustain them, to try and make their way in a world that will destroy them.
God’s love will see us through to the very end. He loves you as an individual so very much.
No matter what circumstances you’re going through, no matter how difficult your life may be at this very moment, no matter the depth of the hurts, the thickness of the scar, God’s love for you as an individual will be sufficient to bring you through to heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Now, some of us are not as bright as others. For some of us, it takes a while for that love to work us through our circumstances.
Now, at home they know that God has a big two-by-four with my name on it, because there are so many times that I’m just too dumb to see the provision of God’s love right in front of me. But His provision is there for you today.
There is no circumstance that can separate you from the love of your God. Nothing shall separate you.
And then God loves the saints—the church, the family of God, the household of saints. He loves them so much.
Ephesians 5:25:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it.
Revelation 21:9:
And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.
You had a wedding yesterday here, and from the reports I hear, there was no question of the joy and the love being experienced and expressed in that wedding. I hear the bride looked quite thrilled to be marrying Lenny Amato. I hear that Lenny knew how fortunate he was to be marrying such a prize. There was such love there, such appreciation.
The love you saw yesterday, the love that you feel in your own marriage and your own home, is so small compared to the love Christ has for us as His people together. It’s just a picture of it.
If you added up all the total love in this room for one another, it does not begin to touch the depth of the love of Jesus for His church. He loved you so much that, while you were yet a sinner, He died for you. He loved His church so much that He gave Himself up for it and has named it publicly as His bride.
He has owned us before the world and said, “This people, who look so paltry and small to you, and whom you ridicule so freely—this people is My bride. This is My beloved.”
What a standing we have, fellas, to be able to know that in a world where everything big, everything impressive, is worshiped and bowed down to, and you give honor and laud the praises of anything that’s big, there can be two or three gathered together in the name of Jesus and He loves it. He owns it. He says, “This is My bride. This is My church. This is My family.”
How God loves His church! He loves the church passionately.
What kind of passion does it take to make a sacrifice for the one you love? How deeply must you feel your love to be able to give so great a price?
He loves the church graciously. I don’t know—you know you’re not perfect in Richmond, and I know in Dothan that we’re not perfect. God has more than enough cause to write a writ of divorce and disown us as His bride.
If, in the Scriptures, unfaithfulness is a justifiable cause for a man and a woman to part, then how much right does God have to part from His church? Have we not been unfaithful? Have we not chased after those things that we wanted? Have we not set man’s head over us from time to time, or doctrine, or program?
We’re such an unfaithful bride so many times, and yet He continues in grace to love us. He is so faithful to us.
God has never chosen another. He has never said, “This is not good enough for Me. I will choose something else.” He has chosen us from the beginning and will keep us to the very end.
It is a marriage that He has no intention of backing out on just because the bride is so unfit for so glorious a position. He is so patiently in love with His church.
For two thousand years, He has been calling His church to Himself. He has been serenading us and swooning us and singing love songs to us for two thousand years, and yet we have not made it to the altar.
He waits patiently for His bride. Oh, how the Lord Jesus loves His church! How blessed we are today to be in this room together as His people and have His love upon us.
Now, here’s a passage that turns everything on its head for us: Galatians 2:20.
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:
and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God,
Who loved me, and gave Himself for me.
God’s love toward us is so amazing. But if this passage is true in us, if this mystery of the life of Christ in me gets worked out, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the kind of love we show should be the kind of love He showers?
If it’s Him living in us, if He’s changing us, renewing us, transforming us, living through us—if it is the life of Christ—should not the love bear the character of the love of Christ?
So let’s go back and look at these three groups of people again with that thought: How should the love of Christ be expressed through me?
The first group was sinners. We read John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.” Romans 5:8: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Titus 3:4: “After the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared.”
These are wonderful expressions of how God loves sinful man.
I think perhaps far too often for us, the expression is that sinners are dirty and nasty people with whom we do not have anything in common, and they’re just too much trouble to care about.
I can share some of my own testimony. When I was a young man, there were only two people who went to the trouble to care about me. One was a high-school basketball scorekeeper, and the other was a church-mouse little girl who grew up in a very legalistic, independent Baptist-type church.
She wore her hair down to here. She wore black dresses to school all the way to her ankles. She did not go to the dances, obviously, but she also could not go to football games, class parties, movies, plays, or anything else. Date? Uh-uh. Not a chance of it for Jane.
But in a high school full of people who knew me intimately, full of good believing kids and believing teachers, two people found that I was not such a pain to be around that they would take the time and make the effort to talk to me about Jesus.
It’s amazing to me, when I look back, that even those two would have cared. But they did.
I can never forget Jane pulling me aside in my junior year in high school and saying, “John, your mouth is awful. You should be embarrassed by the way you talk,” and then using that as a springboard to tell me about how my mouth could be changed.
Then, when I was a senior in high school, Don Malden was the scorekeeper for our high-school basketball team that I played on. Don was an easy target for people like me. He was poorer than I was. His father was a worse drunk than my father was. His family was less socially acceptable than my family was.
When you’re near the bottom and always getting beat on, you’re always looking for a victim to beat on. You want somebody below you. You never want to be the bottom of the rung. Don was an easy target for me.
I was cruel and unmerciful. I was a sorry kid. Don had a speech habit: every sentence ended with “you know.” So we trumped up on the basketball bus and named him “You Know,” and he had to live with that name throughout an entire school year. Nobody called him Don. Everybody called him “You Know.”
And yet, in the midst of the cruelness that I showed Don, Don asked me to go home with him one weekend.
Now, you have to understand, Don’s house was not the sort of house most of us feel comfortable inviting our friends to. Most of us would have hidden that this was our house. But Don had this simple love for his family and for me, to where circumstances didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter to Don that I was the one who was cruel to him. It didn’t matter to Don that his home didn’t have indoor toilets and showers and all the conveniences you would expect. All that mattered to Don was that he wanted to see if he could get me to come spend a weekend with him to tell me about Jesus.
Like an idiot, because no one else would do anything with me, I went home with Don. And thanks be to God that I did, because he told me that Somebody loved me.
How wonderful it was. You know, I share this and it breaks my heart as I think about it, and I know it must affect you.
But I came to know kids from good homes, with good parents, with good circumstances, who didn’t know Jesus loved them either.
It’s not just the dirty and down-and-out. All of us need to know that Jesus loves us. From the wealthiest to the poorest, from the most sophisticated to the most backwoods redneck, we are all lost in our sins and need to know the love of our Saviour.
Jesus paid a price that I might know that love, but He didn’t pay it by Himself. Jane and Don paid a price that I might know that Jesus loved me. They had no guarantee that, as sorry a kid as I was, they were going to come out of our encounters unscathed. They had no guarantee that I was going to break down and cry and repent and accept their love in the love of Jesus.
They didn’t know what the outcome would be, but they really didn’t care about the risk. They cared about me, and they told me.
You know, the lost aren’t really too much trouble, and they’re really not too dirty, if we begin to see who they are. They are those whom God created to love and to be loved by. They are those God made to be our brothers and sisters in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Now, there has to be some intelligence involved. I mean, there are some people that a fourteen-year-old doesn’t need to go and try to share the gospel with. You wouldn’t send a fourteen-year-old to share with a convicted murderer, and you probably wouldn’t ask an old fogey like me to go share with a fifteen-year-old who’s all excited about life.
There’s some intelligence involved—spiritual intelligence, the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But if you find that the love of Christ in you somehow doesn’t translate into a love for lost sinners, maybe you need to ask the Lord Jesus why there’s such a difference between His love toward you and His love coming out of you.
Maybe there are some areas there that the Lord needs to touch and work on. For if it is Christ that liveth in me, then the love that comes out of me should bear the same character as the Saviour within me.
So we need to seriously consider before the Lord our love for men who are yet outside the family of God. They need to know.
“God loves me.” This gets into a sticky area for me. I am the world’s worst hater of pop psychology. It drives me crazy because, in the Deep South, where we all feel insignificant and we all feel like the worst part of the country, and we know all the rest of the country looks at us and says, “Oh”—you know, we still don’t have a governor in Alabama this week, by the way.
We don’t do well in some things. We don’t do well in most things.
This thought that God loves me—you know, pop psychology is real big around home because we all want to feel good about ourselves, and so we’ll hang our hat on anything. That’s why some of the craziest TV evangelist stuff does great in the Deep South, because we’ll do anything to make ourselves think we’re worth something.
Football. Any of y’all ever talk to me about football?
In Alabama, there are three things, when you move to Dothan, Alabama, they want to know: where you work, where you go to church, and are you an Alabama or an Auburn fan? Because those three things will then define you to the community and tell the community where you fit in.
When it says where you go to church, what it really means is, “Are you Baptist, or are you liberal?” That’s what they mean.
Where you work doesn’t really matter—the name of the company—but town is small enough that if we know where you work, we know your income and your social status. So we peg you.
Then we want to know what kind of football thing you are. It’s always amazed me how important football is in Alabama. How many of you have ever seen an Alabama football game where the guy has a stick with a Tide detergent box and a roll of toilet paper on it? That’s because the war cry is “Roll Tide.” I mean, this is the level of sophistication we have.
Ninety percent of the fans never went to college. They didn’t go to the University of Alabama or Auburn University. I’m a great big Troy State graduate. You could put Troy State in this room, probably.
But we’ve become so engrossed with those schools because they have winning programs. They beat them Yankee schools. So we feel significant if we have an Alabama T-shirt on. You know, Notre Dame is scared of us. Virginia Tech couldn’t get on the field with us. And it makes us feel significant.
Well, we buy into every kind of pop psychology for the very same reason: because we want to feel good about ourselves, and we don’t know the correct way to love ourselves.
Of course, Christians, we step back and say, “Oh, can’t love yourself. You’ve got to deny yourself. Yourself is awful.” All that’s true when you’re talking about the fleshly self.
But there is the aspect of loving who God has made you to be, treasuring that, holding it as precious, and caring for it in such a way that you keep yourself in the love of God. That’s the aspect that many of us fail to grasp hold of.
As a result of not grasping how to love ourselves, we frequently become a depressed people. We become a hopeless people. We become very cynical and hard toward others because we are cynical and hard toward ourselves.
Your world should never revolve around you. That would be such a sad life, if me is the center of my universe. But if there is not a healthy, spiritual love and appreciation for who God has made you to be, you will never be able to face the world and express the wonderful love of Christ in a way that will change others.
People buy because they see you believe.
I’m a salesman, and I could not sell if I did not believe in the quality of my product and the quality of the service that we provide. Now, most salesmen can. I can’t. I’m not smart enough and gregarious enough. I don’t have enough personality to make people just want to buy from me.
You guys just don’t know me, believe me. Call anybody in my company. They will tell you.
But I believe in what I’m offering to a customer, and so I do manage to sell.
People accept what you’re telling them about the love of God when they see that it’s impacted you. It does no good to quote them Scriptures that have yet to have an impact in your own life. They see right through it. It sounds hollow. It’s a shell game, and it has no real changing force in the lives of others.
If you don’t believe that God loves you, and if you don’t love who God’s made you to be, it’s going to be very hard for you to convince someone else to love the Lord Jesus.
There needs to be, in a healthy, spiritually right way, a loving of me—loving who God has made me, how mercifully He is transforming me, and caring for that precious life of Christ that is in me.
We need to love ourselves in the right way. If you do, it won’t make you the center of your universe. It will make you willing to risk losing who you are.
Remember, we talked about that Jesus was willing to lose us through the whirlwind, the transformation process. But you have to be willing to decrease. You have to be willing to die to yourself and take up your cross daily. That’s part of loving yourself in a right way, because in doing so, you allow Christ to work in you and change you from glory to glory, to work out your own salvation in Jesus Christ.
So love yourself. Don’t be afraid of that.
Don’t let pop psychology and the flesh steal from you part of your birthright. It is right to love yourself in the right way in Christ Jesus—to take care of yourself, to keep yourself in the love of God, and place yourself before Him in such a way that He can keep you in His love.
And then, of course, there is the love for the church.
1 John 4:11-12:
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.
Ephesians 4:2 speaks of “forbearing one another in love.”
Ephesians 4:32:
Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
Colossians 3:13:
Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any:
even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.
We said that Christ loves His church passionately. Now, brothers and sisters, do you love one another passionately? Have you taken the time to get to know each other in love, to have a genuine affection for one another?
Not fleshly affections. Not, “Oh, you love football and I love football. You like this music. I like this music. You can’t sing. I can’t sing.” Not the things that attract the world to one another.
But have you learned to love each other in Jesus Christ, and feel that love, know that love, to the point that when one suffers, you suffer? When your brother is worn out, you just have to put your arm around him and encourage him. When your sister is in tears, you know how to cry with her.
Have you learned to love one another?
I know those of you who, over the years, have sacrificed so much of your life for the conference have learned to love us in Dothan, and us in Bowling Green, and us in Pittsburgh, and us in California. But have you learned to love one another through it all?
You know, sometimes it’s so much easier to love those people. They’re far away from us, than the ones we have to live with every day—for a lot of reasons.
One is just the wear and tear of everyday life in relationships. The other is, you don’t know me so well as you know these people near you. It’s much easier to love me until you get to know me. So, as long as I only come up here a certain number of times a year, I’m safe.
But it’s tough if I moved up here and lived with you. You might not find me so lovable, would you?
Have you learned to have a passionate love for the household of God? Are you learning to graciously love one another? Am I allowed to be among you as a brother and make a mistake? Is it okay if I just blew it yesterday? Can you still love me and help me past that?
A dear friend of mine who plays tennis with me some was on the tennis court a few weeks ago. He loves the Lord, but circumstances in his life have been very difficult the last five years—family, work, many things have added up against him—and he’s not in a living sort of fellowship.
So he doesn’t get the support that I get when I have problems and struggles. He just blew it on the tennis court the other day. He yelled and screamed and threw his racket and basically challenged the other player to a fistfight. This is a man who publicly talks about the love of Christ.
Is it okay that I still love him? Is it okay that I went to the non-Christian that he blew up at and said, “Look, what this brother did was wrong, and nobody knows it more than him. He wants your forgiveness. He’s asking for your forgiveness. Can you be gracious?”
He knows he made a mistake. Is it okay to blow it? Could these brothers who pay such a price to be in leadership actually make a wrong decision and be forgiven, and still trusted? Could it be that they’re not all wise, but that you’re not all judges, and that you can learn to get past something together?
Have we learned to graciously love one another? Are we faithful to one another?
You know, some of you have known each other an eternity already. I mean, some of you guys are older than me, so, I mean, gee.
Are you still faithful? Is that brother and sister that you’ve been loving for forty years still as precious as the newest thing that comes on the block? Or do you trade them in every ten years for new buddies? Do we fall in love with someone else and forget those that we’ve loved before?
One wonderful thing about the love of Christ in the saints is there’s enough of it for everyone. If I will just let the Lord stretch me, He can get enough love worked out in me to love every one of His saints. There’s enough love there.
Are you being faithful and patient? Can you be patient with one another? Is that being worked out in a living way?
Are you young people, you younger families, still able to patiently bear up with the old way of doing things while you’re so anxious to change the whole world? Can you be patient and let the old fogies figure out, you know, these guys really do know a little bit, and some of these new songs are pretty good?
Can you be patient with one another in love?
It’s not easy to let His love come out through us, because the price that Jesus paid to love us is the same price we must pay to love one another.
Now, I do not in any way think that you or I are capable of a love as great as His. But for His love to be worked out through us does require that we die to ourselves, just as He died on our behalf.
Now, when I die to myself, that does not redeem anyone. But it does allow Him to have His way in me. When He died, it was for the redemption of all mankind. There is an enormous difference, and I’m not in any way trying to compare the two as being even close in value or scope.
But for you and me as individuals, to die to ourselves is the most we can do. There’s no greater price we can pay. That is the price required of us to love one another as Christ has loved us.
Creation is a love story.
Our redemption is a love story.
Our walk—that great mystery, Christ in me, the hope of glory—is a love story.
And eternity, on whose threshold we stand with trembling hearts, just waiting to hear that trumpet sound, is a love story.
The whirlwind, the judgment, the transforming process, the pressures, the joys, the rejoicing, and the crying of tears together—it’s all a love story, because our God is love.
Through it all, the love of Christ will keep us, if we will be kept. It’s a love story, brothers and sisters. No price, no suffering, no challenge is done for the sake of anger and revenge. It’s all His love toward us.
It’s all a love story, and He has written it on our hearts in the blood of Jesus.
May we go forth and love one another in our Lord Jesus.
Father, how very grateful we are this morning for the great love with which You have loved us. May we love You, love our Saviour, and love all that You have created with the same passion and love that You have loved us.
Help us to go forth and love one another. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.