God is Love | Kristi's Morning Devotional

November 17, 2020November 17, 2020

Looking For Love

Yesterday our family plans for Thanksgiving changed dramatically! We learned that some of those we hold dear won’t be able to come. Many of you are just like us and are finding that your Thanksgiving table will have empty chairs and your homes will have fewer loved ones sleeping under your roofs.

It’s so disappointing.

With that news centered in my heart I came to my chair and prayed for our family and those of you that will be missing loved ones this year. I felt the Lord’s love wrap around me and His peace settle in. I am content in His presence.

“I pray that because of the riches of His shining-greatness, He will make you strong with power in your hearts through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁷I pray that Christ may live in your hearts by faith. I pray that you will be filled with love. ¹⁸I pray that you will be able to understand how wide and how long and how high and how deep His love is. ¹⁹I pray that you will know the love of Christ. His love goes beyond anything we can understand. I pray that you will be filled with God Himself.” Ephesians 3:16-19 NLV

The photo for this morning’s blog was taken about eight years ago at our home in Montana. It was a particularly hard day for me. I was dealing with loneliness and my heart was aching. Dave was gone and it was up to me to check the fences to make sure none of them had gone down because of the previous night’s snow.

As I walked along the road I was telling the Lord of my hurt and disappointment. With tears in my eyes I looked up and saw this obvious expression of God’s love. There, twisted into the barbed wire fence, was a heart with the snow glistening like diamonds behind it. It was just for me – a sign of my Father’s love and presence.

That morning I found an expression of love in a pasture fence. I’m wondering what I will find today.

The Apostle Paul prayed that we would have strong hearts and that we would know the depth of our Father’s love. Just when I think I couldn’t experience any greater depth of His love I find that it goes even deeper.

Since God is love and there is no beginning or end to Him, there is also no beginning or end to His love. He loves us – of that I am certain!

May I encourage you today to Look for Love. You will find it. It will be coming from the Father’s heart.

February 1, 2020February 1, 2020

What Is Love

Do you remember the movie from the 1970’s, Love Story? You know the one with Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal. “Who?” you ask. For those of you in the younger generations, google it. It was the Romeo and Juliet movie for our modern generation. There is a line from that movie that gained great notoriety; “love means never having to say you’re sorry”.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that for time on end we have been trying to define love. In the 70’s there were these cartoons in the paper at least once a week called “Love Is”. There were so many definitions and examples of love. But love isn’t a cartoon in the paper or a movie that makes you cry.

True love isn’t a feeling. It’s not something we fall into and out of. After being married for forty-seven years I know that for certain. Love is an act of will. Love is being loving on the days you don’t feel like it, love is never giving up.

God’s love never fails – God just doesn’t have love for us, He is love! If we want to know what love looks like and how it acts, we simply look at God. Love is patient and kind; God doesn’t keep score, He doesn’t keep a list of things that we do wrong. He isn’t envious or boastful either.

“Dear friends, we should love each other, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has become God’s child. And so everyone who loves knows God. ⁸Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹This is how God showed his love to us: He sent his only Son into the world to give us life through him. ¹⁰True love is God’s love for us, not our love for God. He sent his Son as the way to take away our sins. ¹¹That is how much God loved us, dear friends! So we also must love each other.” I John 4:7-11 ERV

God loves us enough that He won’t push Himself on us; He didn’t make us puppets but people with a free will so that our love for Him would be from the heart and not forced or coerced. He wants relationship with us not mindless servitude.

“We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” I John 4:16 NLT

What is love?…Love is the very essence of God.

September 23, 2019September 23, 2019

Nothing Greater

Have you ever reflected on God’s love, truly reflected on it? The amazing thing about God’s love is there is nothing we can do to earn and there is nothing we can do to lose it. God’s love isn’t a feeling or an emotion – God is love! Everything that makes God God is that he is love.

“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful. ⁷No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a truly good person. ⁸But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinful.

⁹But there is more! Now that God has accepted us because Christ sacrificed his life’s blood, we will also be kept safe from God’s anger. ¹⁰Even when we were God’s enemies, he made peace with us, because his Son died for us. Yet something even greater than friendship is ours. Now that we are at peace with God, we will be saved by his Son’s life.” Romans 5:6-10 CEV

Yesterday television was filled with programming on people who are striving to be acknowledged as the “best”. Awards shows, play-off games, most valuable player of the game, economic advisors, news pundits, politicians – all vying for a place in the spot light, all wanting acknowledgement for who they are. They’ve lost sight of the most important thing; God loves them and that is irrefutable.

We have been conditioned to try and earn love. That kind of love is selfish and vain. It is based on what I do to make you happy; what I say to make you look good; how I look to keep you from being embarrassed, etc. We hear some say “I just don’t love them any more, we’ve fallen out of love, I’ve fallen in love with someone else”. But that love is based on a feeling, any emotional response. But that’s so contrary to God’s love.

“And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. ³⁹No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39 NLT

Nothing, NOTHING, can separate us from God’s love! You may have awaken with a feeling of loneliness or depression; you may feel unworthy or unrecognized by those around you but that’s not from God. He won’t allow anything to separate us from His love.

“I pray that you will be able to understand how wide and how long and how high and how deep His love is. ¹⁹I pray that you will know the love of Christ. His love goes beyond anything we can understand. I pray that you will be filled with God Himself.

²⁰God is able to do much more than we ask or think through His power working in us.” Ephesians 3:18-20 NLV

Those words are part of a prayer that the Apostle Paul was praying for the people in a city call Ephesus. They are also the words I pray for myself and for you. I want us all to be consciously aware of the greatness of God’s love for us.

There truly is Nothing Greater!

October 31, 2018

Loving Others

In light of all that’s been going on in our world lately I wanted to share these thoughts.

Pooh is right; we feel love and that feeling can be labeled compassion. Jesus was moved with compassion to help those who were hurting. True Love is a person. That person is Jesus and it’s His desire that we love one another.

Jesus said the world would know that we are His disciples if we love one another. Jesus ministry was marked by His love for everyone He came in contact with. He loved the sinners and publicans; the tax collectors and the prostitutes, He even showed his love for the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He reached out to all with loving arms and was moved with compassion toward all.

“I give you a new command: Love each other. You must love each other just as I loved you. ³⁵All people will know that you are my followers if you love each other.” John 13:34-35 ERV

As Christians we should be a light of God’s love in this world. He is the one who gets the glory when we walk in love. No one is excluded from his love. Jesus never accepted sin but he also never rejected a sinner. Doctrines and dogmas can be divisive but when we are being led by the Holy Spirit we will have a heart of love even when we don’t agree.

The Apostle Paul gave this instruction to the Christians at the church in Philippi.

“Think about what we have in Christ: the encouragement he has brought us, the comfort of his love, our sharing in his Spirit, and the mercy and kindness he has shown us. If you enjoy these blessings, ²then do what will make my joy complete: Agree with each other, and show your love for each other. Be united in your goals and in the way you think. ³In whatever you do, don’t let selfishness or pride be your guide. Be humble, and honor others more than yourselves. ⁴Don’t be interested only in your own life, but care about the lives of others too.” Philippians 2:1-4 ERV

Make it a goal to walk in love so that the world will see Jesus living in us!