When I want to send an important message to my wife, I have several methods to choose from to convey this message.  I can text her, email her, call her …….. Have you ever heard something like, “this is not something you say in an email…..”, and actually get into an argument over the method used to convey the message, so much so that the message itself ends up being lost, dissipated, overlooked or unnoticed? The way we convey the message can dominate and overshadow the message. Regardless of how crucial the method is, the message is of utmost value.

John 3:16 is a verse that Christians, regardless of classification, can recite verbatim. Go ahead, recite it. Please go ahead and say it out loud. What does the verse convey to you? Probably something like this;

God sent His son Jesus as a sacrifice to save me

Is JESUS the message? No, Jesus is the method.

The message is LOVE; “For God so loved…

You will think or say, “Semantics as God showed His love by sacrificing Jesus, so it is one and the same.”

This is where the argument about the method starts, or have started a few years after Jesus was Resurrected and have not stopped since.

God sent His son to die for me, what more do I need to know that God loves me??

This of course is TRUE and CRUCIAL but making it the ONLY thing we focus on, at least in my opinion, does not allow us to experience the LOVE of our LORD and Creator to you and me “His message”. We know about HIS LOVE, but we do not experience HIS LOVE. We all know that LOVE is action and the LOVE action is continual. And our Lord throughout the Bible expresses that His LOVE is supreme and shows us how we can continually experience His LOVE. The danger in teaching our children that God’s LOVE is all about one event that happened 2,000 years ago, keeps God’s LOVE in their mind and not in their heart.

To be passionately and madly in love with our God and our Lord, we have to use the Bible, including the crucifixion and resurrection, to keep God in the hearts of our children, not just their minds. I say children as we, the adults, have painted God into a box in our minds. Of course we adults can work on bringing Him into our hearts. There is so much we can learn to fall passionately and madly in love with our Lord, Creator and God. Think of the picture at the beginning of this blog. Hope you know it and yes we can be THAT passionately and madly in LOVE with our LORD and Creator.

Of course Jesus is real and He is LORD, one with our LORD and Creator. Jesus indeed was crucified and resurrected and the crucifixion is indeed an awesome, overwhelming and tremendous method for our LORD and God to convey His message of LOVE to humanity. This I would imagine is agreed upon by all of Christianity.

It is the details of the method and what each component of the method may entail, that keeps people arguing and it occupies our time so much that we keep God trapped in our minds and not in our hearts.

Let’s not kid ourselves, such details were not made clear to humanity, yet humanity cannot accept that. God did not clarify it, and we are bent out of shape to clarify and explain the mind of God. I believe that God wants us to focus on His heart, for that is all over the Bible starting from Creation and throughout, and leave the mind of the Creator to the Creator.

Of course there will always be theories and debates, and that is fine, but we need to keep these at bay as “opinions” and not as doctrine.

You can participate in helping the various churches transcend their differences and cooperate together for HIS GLORY and to teach His message His LOVE not only through the crucifixion but through the multitude of LOVE ACTIONS, PAST AND PRESENT.

Ask these following questions to your leaders so that they may GLORIFY our LORD AND CREATOR further than we do now.

Did God intend to have so many divisions within His church/ Is God’s LOVE for man means to fight over what Jesus said or meant/ Is God looking at us delighted about our divisions or sad? Simple questions begging a simple answer, and that answer is; we have created the divisions and we can undo them and reunite. It is possible not impossible. Why? Because it is indeed God’s plan for us to be united in Him. ALL united in Him. Till next week 🙂