The fact that God loves us is a constant. It is we as His children fall into two spiritual camps: those that acknowledge and accept this love grudgingly, with suspicion and narrow-eyed hard heartedness. They question God's love for others especially, placing special judgments on others' specific category of sin. These people can range from the hateful extremists of the Westboro Baptist Church, to the lady who greets everyone at church with a hard, forced smile and loud proclamations that Jesus loves you!! and then bitterly berates the store clerk for some short-coming, causing personal trauma to her in the check line. Other members may simply struggle with understanding how God could ever forgive them and continue to love them, much less anyone else. This sounds a lot like me.
The other camp, the one I long to be a part of, is those who are so wrapped up in Jesus' love that it's seen by everyone else as though a garment. They make others long to be enveloped in that garment of love, drawing all types of people near mostly without their knowing what the attraction is. These lovers of God have no forced smiles or sense of entitlement. Joy radiates from their person and their countenance, totally messing up their hair. They know and understand that God said "'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy." (Romans 9:15-16). Like children, they know what they know. But being adults, they already understand that the world is fallen and while sin seems to run rampant, God' love never fails.
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My blog; my thoughts. And I know that my thoughts are not His thoughts, my ways are not His ways. But, occasionally, I hear from Him : )