God is Love

 

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Exodus 20:8-12 King James Version

⁸ Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: ¹⁰ But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

 

The only time God spoke to humanity in His official position, He gave the ten commandments to them through the most impressive set of fireworks ever seen.

The fourth commandment is the center of His presentation. In it He identifies Himself as the Creator of heaven and earth and sea. He states that He made these in six days and rested the seventh, which He calls the Sabbath.

Let’s do a thought experiment. God identifies Himself as a creator of heaven, earth, and sea—that is, of our universe. I think in this way. Suppose God enjoys and administers his vast creations. The biggest number the Greeks named was a myriad. So maybe God spends a myriad years enjoying His creation. During this time His marvelous intellect explores other ideas for another, a different universe. Mentally, He plays around with the physics of this new universe, and the creatures He would like to have. His ideas are vast and sometimes quite strange: think of giraffe vs. rhinoceros, humming bird vs. ostrich, sloth vs. human.

God’s excitement builds over those ten-thousand years until He can’t hold it in. He spends a week creating this new universe. Then he monitors carefully how things develop there while He continues running His vast other universes. His overwhelming rule is that of love: the love of God for His creatures, the love of His creatures for Him, and the love His creatures have for each other.

Time goes by. Myriads progress one after another. Envision this happening since time immemorial. There is no first universe creation. God has always been doing this! Then God’s greatest helper decides he can run all these universes better than God has been doing. He has been God’s right-hand angel since time immemorial. He skillfully starts the greatest coup d’état ever attempted. God in love does not kill him outright, but he is driven from heaven. He chooses to take up residence in God’s latest creation. He swiftly defeats its lord—Adam and Eve. Then God lets him develop his insurrection until everyone in all of God’s universes recognizes that Satan is a brutal imposter.

We are in the final scenes of this fierce struggle. Love eventually overcomes evil. Notice that EVIL is simply LOVE spelt backwards with “I” taking the place of the hug, “O”. Without love, life becomes misery or evil.

I awoke this morning with words of the song “The Love of God” running through my mind.

The love of God is greater far
  Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star
  And reaches to the lowest hell.
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
  God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled
  And pardoned from his sin.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
  How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
  The saints’ and angels’ song.

When hoary time shall pass away,
  And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall;
When men who here refuse to pray,
  On rocks and hills and mountains call;
God’s love, so sure, shall still endure,
  All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—
  The saints’ and angels’ song.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
  And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
  And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
  Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
  Though stretched from sky to sky.

Frederick M. Lehman, 1917
v. 3 by Anonymous/Unknown

 

Dear Lord, I love You and yearn for Your final banishment of evil and establishment of Your kingdom of love!

 

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Tight Fisted Treasurer

 

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Philippians 4:6 GOD’S WORD Translation (GW)

⁶ Never worry about anything. But in every situation let God know what you need in prayers and requests while giving thanks.

We had worked as missionaries in Africa for 12 years. The Lord had richly blessed us. We had hundreds of friends. Many of our students were already making their mark on the world. Now the Lord had told us that He wanted us to return to the U.S.

Then we got a letter from the mission board. It stated coldly that we had only worked in Africa for three years. They had no responsibility to return us to the U.S. They had decided to fly us to the nearest airport in the U.S. and drop us. It was up to us to make our way from there. The same mission board had consistently garnished our wages upwards of 50% for “the Lord’s work.”

We were stunned. We had spent all our savings just surviving in Africa. This is a part of mission work that the home churches never see. I requested that they do the very minimum and drop us back in Detroit where we had originally left from. We prayed to the Lord fervently. We literally didn’t have enough money left to get from Boston, where they chose to drop us, to Detroit near family. We praised the Lord that He had blessed us in spite of the tightfisted man who controlled our funds.

When we arrived in the States, at my dad’s urging—he had been a missionary to Africa for 42 years—I wrote headquarters and explained our plight. The treasurer there thundered back, “They can’t do that to you!” He went on to say that he was the one who had originally hired us to go to Africa 12 years earlier. Then for the next six months we received check after check of bonuses that we were entitled to but had no knowledge of. This amounted to thousands and thousands of dollars.

Since that time, the Lord has abundantly blessed us, even beyond our dreams or expectations. We had never wanted to be rich, and we still aren’t. But we are comfortable. Indeed, praise the Lord!

We are grateful, Lord, that You look after Your own so well. We rest our future in Your marvelous nail-pierced hands!

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[1] https://slideplayer.com/slide/13596288/

Enthusiasm, Even for Work

 

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Colossians 3:23 Holman Christian Standard Bible

²³ Whatever you do, do it enthusiastically, as something done for the Lord and not for men,

 

In high school I was required to do somewhere between 4 and 8 hours of physical work a week. My first year there I worked for my math teacher Ken Thomas. He had created a little industry making honey frames to go in bee hives. With very primitive equipment he set up a mass production system that taught me quite a bit. He left at the end of the year, and I have no recollection of what I did for physical work my last two years. I assure you I had no enthusiasm for what I was doing. Part of that was that we got paid a tickey an hour. That was the equivalent of about 3¢ an hour. Even in those days that was a total insult to anybody. When my mother learned about it, she was furious, “I can’t even get you work clothes at that rate!” she fumed.

When I went to college at Andrews University, my whole attitude had changed. I shopped around at various work opportunities and found very little that would fit in my schedule. The head of custodial, Art Davis, saw me vainly searching for work: “I’ll give you work” he offered. I jumped for it. The next Sunday I reported for work. There was a call for all students to help reap ornamental gourds on the farm, so Mr. Davis sent a bunch of us over to help the university farm. They had planted a whole field of these pretty little fall decorative items.

I grabbed a bag and started picking all the good ones. It was back-breaking work because the gourds were all on small vines close to the ground. But I worked cheerfully and with enthusiasm. I didn’t realize that some people were watching the whole group of us who were doing this. Word got back to Mr. Davis. When I reported for work the next day, I discovered I had not only a job but also a friend in Mr. Davis. He told me he appreciated my enthusiasm and work ethic. He gave me the best paying jobs on campus and enabled me to pay my own way through college until I graduated.

I confess that the thought had not entered my head that I was doing this for the Lord. But over the next few years, I discovered that a lot of the bosses I had were not like Mr. Davis. They wanted to get the absolute most out of me and pay me the absolute least they could get away with. After the first year of full-time teaching and abuse, I said to my wife, Sylvia, “I have decided that I am working for the Lord, but humans are paying me. I will continue to work for the Lord.” She concurred with me. God saw to it that I always had a job and, although I never got rich, things went better and better for me and my family. I gained a lot of satisfaction from my work, and now we are comfortably retired. Praise the Lord!

Thank You, Lord, for prospering us and for giving us a satisfying life.

 

 

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[1] https://www.ebpsupply.com/blog/how-to-use-floor-buffer-vs-burnisher