God Is: Week 2

I want you to think of one word you would describe yourself as, it can be anything.

You may not know this, but God actually describes himself in the Bible. He is speaking to Moses and he shares a description of himself in a song. It’s not like a Bieber song or anything else, and it didn’t have harps behind it, but he describes himself in Exodus 34.

Exodus 34:6-7 says, “Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”

We are looking at different character traits of God and who He is. If someone has ever told us something that we are unsure of about God, then we need to make sure to turn to God's Word to learn the truth.

So, what is this verse saying here when God uses these words for Himself? He is saying the best way to describe me is love. Some people have a hard time seeing God as loving. They think of God as having a lot of rules and regulations. They think of all the hell, fire and brimstone. They think of God as a guy who sits on the clouds and throws down lightning bolts from the sky. I don’t think that is what God is going for, so what does it mean that God is love?

He Cares About Us

Now you might have had people in your life that were less than caring.

• You might have had a mom or dad who were too busy with work or life to be concerned with you.
• You might have had a teacher who played favorites who avoided you in class.
• Or maybe it was an older or younger sibling who was mean to you constantly. Instead of making you feel loved they pushed you away.

Jesus does the opposite because he loves & cares for us. You can find it in John 3:16. It says, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave[a] his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”

Do you see what word it uses there? It says he loved the world. He cares deeply about each of us. Now talk is cheap. I can say I love BTS. I can say all day long that they are my favorite band, but you’re going to want to see some action that backs it up. You’re going to want to see my T-Shirt, autographed picture, Spotify playlist or something else that justifies this, which I have. You are going to want to see some action. God shows his love by sending Jesus to die for every wrong thing we have ever done, so we could have life forever in heaven.

Think of the person you love most in this world. I can’t imagine sending to die for people who can’t seem to get it right. People who constantly break the rules. People who one day are all in and the next seem disconnected. But God sent his only son. Why? Because there was no other way to make things right. He did it because he loves us. He cared enough to take action. What does it mean that God is love?

He Adopts us as His Own

This is important because all of us know what it feels like to be rejected. Remember when you finally got the courage to ask that girl or guy out, maybe you tried out for a role in a play, or you might have gone out for a team and didn’t make the cut. We all hate being rejected. God didn’t reject us but he takes us in as his own sons and daughters.

Here is what it says in 1 John 3:1, “See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!”

I don’t know if you have ever seen an adoption story but it is so powerful. When an orphan child or foster kid gets adopted by a family that loves them it is overwhelming. Usually, they hold this big ceremony at the courthouse. The judge asks the family a bunch of questions and the kid is asked the same. When they become an official part of the family everyone celebrates. God wants that for all of us. Your family might be screwed up. You might have been rejected by everyone else, but God loves you.

When you think about all he has done for you and how much he wants you to have a life of impact here on this earth and how he wants you to spend forever with him in heaven one day. When you think about the fact that there is nothing you can do today to cause God to love you a little bit more and there is nothing you can do today to cause God to love you a little bit less. Think about the sacrifice he made for you, how he forgives you over and over again, and how he never gives up on you.

God's greatest desire is that you would want to be a part of his family. What should our response be to God’s love?

John 3:16 says, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”

He Died For Me, I’ll Live For Him

We should want to show our love back to him by the way we live our life. Because we love him back, we don’t want to disappoint him. We don’t want to let him down and because we know he loves us we can understand that the things he wants us to do and the things he wants us to stay away from, he says those things so we can have the best life possible.

• Why does God want us to tell the truth?

Because he doesn’t want you to be a liar where no one believes a word that comes out of your mouth. Lies hurt people. Do you like it when someone lies to you?

• Why does he want you to obey your parents?

He wants your home to be a place that you look forward to going to and not a place where everybody is yelling at each other and everyone is on each other’s case.

• Why does God want you to spend time with him in the Bible and in prayer?

It’s because he loves you and he wants to spend some time with you and share with you a better way to live through the Bible.

• Why does God tell us to go teach others about him?

Because you and I are God’s plan to bring hope and healing to a broken and hurting world.

God is love. We are told that the greatest pursuit of our life should be to love God back with all of our heart, and with all of our soul and with all of our mind and with all of our strength.

That pretty much means with everything you have.

• In every decision you make you choose to love God.
• In your attitude, you choose to love God.
• In what you do and where you go, you choose to love God. In everything we say, we must choose to love God.

When I was nine years old I understood for the first time what Jesus did for me in dying for my sin and rising again from the dead three days later.

I couldn’t believe how mean the people were to Jesus. I couldn’t understand why they were treating him this way. Why did they have to beat him and laugh at him and spit on him? Why did they have to crucify him? My mom read me the story of the love of God for you and me and I remember as a 9-year-old kid crying out to my mom “Why are they doing this to him? He has done nothing wrong.”

And that is true. He has done nothing wrong. But we have done a lot of wrongs. We owed a holy God a sin debt that we could never pay back on our own. And because God loved us and wanted to rescue us from ourselves, he showed us the full extent of his love by sending Jesus to die for our sins.

We have sinned against Him, been selfish for what we want instead of His plan for those around us, we have fallen short, and deserve punishment. None of us deserved to be loved, we deserve the consequence of the story we have written. But the good news today is how the story of who God is changes all of that. God has been willing to adopt us and and even die for us even when we could never do anything to earn it. God is a God who has defined our story by His love. He didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world, but to save it. God cares about you. He loves you with unconditional love. And because of this he wants to adopt you as his own, into the family of God.

John 15:13 says, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Jesus laid down His life for us, so now let's choose to live for Him. If you want to find out how you can turn your story around and choose to see who God is in your life.