God’s Love – indycrowe

The Father’s Love in Adoption

This post continues a series on The Love of the Father. Below are the prior posts.
Reasons We Struggle to Experience God’s Love
Seven Features of God’s Fatherly Love
God’s Love in Revealing Himself
The Father’s Love in Sending His Son

I’m thankful for the forgiveness of sin, the removal of condemnation and punishment, and the promise of eternal life in a resurrected body. I’m thankful I don’t have to carry guilt and shame because Christ took it away. But of all the blessings we have in Christ, there is none greater than being adopted by God so that we become his beloved sons and daughters. J. I. Packer states that adoption is “the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification…. Adoption is higher, because of the richer relationship with God that it involves.”[1]

The Father’s Love in Sending His Son

There are many proofs of God’s love scattered throughout the pages of Scripture. We notice further testimony of God’s loving kindness in his mercy and gifts both in creation around us and in our lives every single day. But there is no greater demonstration of God’s love than in the Father sending his only Son to save us. If the evidences of God’s love were a mountain, with new discoveries and greater examples of his love unfolding as we climb higher and higher in the knowledge of God, at the very top would still be the costliest, most needed, and most valuable of all gifts ever given: Jesus. The gift of Jesus includes not just that he was sent (incarnation) but that he was sent with the mission of a dying on the cross in our place, taking the punishment we deserved.

God’s Love in Revealing Himself

This post continues a series on The Love of the Father. Below are the first two posts.
Reasons We Struggle to Experience God’s Love
Seven Features of God’s Fatherly Love

One of my favorite things to do with my four-year-old daughter is enjoy a dessert together—or get a treat, as she calls it. Whether it’s ice-cream, a good cookie, or a donut, we bond as we talk, laugh, and savor the sweets. She’s recently been asking me to tell her stories about myself. It’s partly because she just likes to hear stories, and it’s partly because she gets to know me by the things I share. Whether it’s through these stories, in everyday conversation, or over the course of time as she sees what I’m like she desires to know me. All children desire this.

Seven Features of God’s Fatherly Love

Before discussing what God’s love looks like—and I’m looking specifically at how God loves us with as our father—I want to briefly consider a few reasons why “love” might lack clarity or even be unhelpful today.

Reasons We Struggle to Experience God’s Love

It can be difficult to grasp God’s love for us. For many, the love of Jesus comes through loud and clear, but God the Father often seems distant or looming. God’s attributes—including love—aren’t like human traits that strengthen or weaken nor are they like moods that come and go. God is all of his attributes perfectly, all the time. And yet, we still struggle to believe it can be true, that this great God can love us messy and stumbling sinners. Sometimes we don’t feel his love on a day-to-day basis like we desire, so walls of doubt begin to shut him out. Other times we unwittingly read the Word not through the lens of his love and grace to us in Christ, but through tinted lens of condemnation and guilt.

God’s Steadfast Love Endures Forever: November Gratitude Reading Plan (Day 14)

(This devotional is day fourteen of a 30-Day Thanksgiving Challenge. Each day includes a daily reading that will be accompanied by a post on this blog.)

Read Psalm 136

The Psalmist opens (1-3) and closes (26) this song with the call to give thanks. In between, he moves from God’s glorious attributes and powerful acts seen in Creation (4-9), Redemption (10-22), and ongoing Provision (23-25). There is more than enough reason to thank God in each realm. Anchoring every verse is the refrain: “for his steadfast love endures forever.” We thank God for His many gifts, and none are greater than His steadfast love.

The Lion King and God’s Protecting Love

Early in Disney’s The Lion King, Mufasa perches high on Pride Rock, overlooking his African territory. Next to him sits his beloved son, Simba.

Mufasa tells Simba, “Everything the light touches is our kingdom.”

Continue reading The Lion King and God’s Protecting Love

See It!

One word in the Bible can be a game changer. When John says “SEE what kind of the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are” (1 John 3:1), it’s like he brings us to a halt with hands waving and fingers pointing to a jaw-dropping sight. You’ve got to see this! Look! Come and see something you won’t believe! While we are quick to speak of God-especially his love-with generalizations and glance over Scripture in our readings, John invites us to slow down, take a look at something, and be amazed.

Continue reading See It!

A Few Links

Here are the links to a few recent things I’ve written for other websites.

Our church is hosting Dr. John Piper this weekend for our THINK|14 conference. To start tilling the soil of our hearts I provided two blogs.
Why Theology Matters…For Everyone
A Primer on Philippians

Here was an article giving three reasons the ascension matters for us right now. The Ascension: What’s Jesus Up To?

On this blog I did seven individual articles on ways God the Father loves us. I condensed them into a summary article for Gospel-Centered Discipleship.