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| SUNDAY | March 28 |
By creating humanity with a free moral will, that is, by giving humans the capacity to choose to obey or disobey Him, God also had made provision for the potential consequences should humanity make the wrong choice with the freedom given it. That provision is what’s known as the “gospel,” the good news of what Jesus has done for us in order to restore us to the eternal life that we were originally created to have.
Read 2 Timothy 1:9. Dwell on the implications of the idea that God had prepared the plan of salvation even before the world began. What does it tell us about God’s unconditional love for us that He would do this even before we existed? How does this text help us understand what grace is all about?
God’s great love and grace were in operation for us even before our existence. The gospel was, in a sense, a warranty on our souls. God knew what was going to happen and, in His love and wisdom, He had the plan of salvation in place to meet the crisis when it arrived. And, of course, at the center of that plan was the sacrificial death of Jesus in our stead. The only way we could be redeemed from our fallen condition was through the Cross, the place where God Himself, in our humanity, bore the punishment for our sins. Nothing else would have sufficed; nothing else could have. No matter how steep the price, Jesus was willing to pay it in our behalf.
How then are we to respond in the face of such love for us? Eph. 4:32; Eph. 5:2; Phil. 2:5-8; Col. 3:13. What is the basic message that all these texts have in common?
To love unconditionally is an alien concept to the human heart. There is almost always an ulterior motive, one usually tainted with self. Yet, at the same time, if we had to wait until our motives were absolutely pure, we might not get anything done, would we? How much time should you spend, then, dwelling on the character of Christ? How could that help you learn to act more and more out of the kind of unconditional love that has been shown to us in Jesus?
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