What makes God's love so different from other kinds of love? What does Scripture say about this love? What happens when we embrace it?
In this episode Vincent, one our BCC members and welcomers, shares his experience of how God's love brought him to faith and shaped his lifestyle choices, how through the community of faith he found his wife, how by God's mercy he survived a stabbing attack, and how by God's grace he publicly forgave his attacker. Vincent testifies: \"I have Jesus, He has done many things for me and his promises to me are yes and amen.\"
In our talk, Pastor Peter Clothier shares three characteristics of God's love. This love is completely undeserved. This is one of the reasons Jesus was, and continues to be, so attractive to people who are broken, who are outcasts, sinful, and considered disreputable by their wider society. In a powerful image, Peter imagines us being invited to a screening of our own personal version of This is Your Life, in which our every thought and action is made visible to the world. Who would want to be invited to that? Yet Jesus - the one who knows us completely - is the one who loves us the most.
Peter goes on to share that God's love is demonstrated - in Jesus coming to earth, showing God's character through His actions and teaching, and ultimately through His own self-sacrifice on our behalf.
Thirdly, God's love is transformational. Peter's talk draws extensively from the writings of the apostle John who is often called the apostle of love. Yet as we read about John in the gospels we see the John whom Jesus called to be His disciple was impetuous, volatile, and ambitious. Jesus gave him and his brother James the nick-name \"Sons of Thunder.\" When John writes about Jesus in his gospel, and in his letters to his churches, we see a man transformed by the love of God.
Peter invites us to embrace that love today, and submit ourselves to its transforming power.
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