love

I got an email from my friend which said as follow:

I will share with you my perception of five different truths that every Christian should know. The dictionary defines truth as a spiritual reality. What does it mean?

Truth #1
Assurance of Salvation

Let us look in 1 John where we find information on Assurance of Salvation .

"This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we may live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." (1 John 4:9-10)

"Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (1 John 4:11)

"Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. ... And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life..." (1 John 5:10-12)

What a powerful message! All we have to do is accept God's love and believe in Jesus Christ by following his command to love one another.

We, Protestants, like to be assured and secured. We have been preaching our assurance of salvation since Luther’s time. We like to be reminded again and again of God’s salvation to us every single Sunday. We enjoying saying God loves you that why He saved you. Now you are loved and saved. All you have to do is love one another and preach the gospel. That’s all. This is what we Protestants believe. It is true that it is because of the love of God, we are saved and yet for us God’s love is to only cure our sins. God has never fail to love us before and after we are sinned. For Him, love always comes first. But we Protestants revised it. We put sins before God instead of love. We commit sins and that is why we come to see Him. Our sins brought us to obey Him not our love. We are afraid of going to Hell. If we do not accept God’s love we will go to Hell because we still are sinners. It is our second main focus. Salvation! Not love. It is not the love that makes us wanting to be saved. It is not because of the un-separable love that we have for God giving us the desire to be saved. It just simply because we afraid to go to Hell. Thus we really do not know God’s love for us.

Sadly, we apply this rule to our fellow brothers. As we do not know God’s love the same way we do not know how to love our neighbours. When we meet people the first thing that we seek is the person’s weakness or sins in his life. Love does not come first. Once we find the person’s weakness or sins we try to point out all sins that he has. Then we will point out all his weakness and convince him to say a sinner prayer. Where is love? When dose it come? We might say that it is because of the love for the person, we preach gospel and point out his sins. Yet, if we think clearly our emphasises is more on man’s fallen nature rather then loving him. Initiatively, Jesus shows his love to the adulterous woman and Zaccheus without condemning them. It is love that changes their lives and to love one another.

Thus, let us truly understand God’s love and let it change us. Then secondly let us genuinely love one another.