Many of these Sunday messages have been about God's love and today I would like to mention a few Scriptures for your further thoughts. They are familiar, but at the beginning of this new year let's seek the Holy Spirit for a deeper understanding of each.

Scripture has much to say concerning God's love and I will begin with 1 John 4:9-10 "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins."

Do we really comprehend even in the smallest measure how great a love this is? Just think that while we were His enemies, sinners, opposed to and not even wanting to know Him, Christ died that we might be saved and reconciled to God. The pure and sinless for the wretched and sinful.

For a description of our former state read Ephesians 2:1-3. Verse 3 says, "Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest."

Because God first loved and sent His Son, we now love Him. It was NOT the other way around. Look at Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3, does it not suggest that we must seek to comprehend this Love?

"For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through (by) faith; and that you being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God." Ephesians 3:14-19

As Paul says, this love surpasses knowledge. The way to come to know this Love is to know Christ Jesus our Lord.

As the song says,
"To know Him, to know Him is life..."

Let us make it our prayer and priority that we may come to KNOW Christ in a greater measure this coming year. Let us pray for that 'hunger and thirst for righteousness' spoken of by Jesus in Matthew 5:6. For He said those who do are blessed and will be filled.

He also said in Matthew 7:7-8,
"Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened."

So with Paul, let us press on in order that we may lay hold of all that for which we were laid hold of by Christ Jesus. (See Philippians 3:12)

All praise and glory to our Almighty God! Amen