A Love Letter (The Gospel & Its Implications)

I recently had the chance to write a letter to one of our youth students. As I wrote it, I found myself being reminded of such great truths I thought it would even be worth sharing more broadly…

Dear Believer,

God’s love has been such a challenge for me and I hope it is for you. Here are a few verses with some of my thoughts around them…

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written,

“For Your sake, we are being put to death all day long;
We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Rom 8:31-39

God’s love toward us is perfect and complete being fully proved in His willingness to kill Jesus on our behalf. There is nothing that can take His love away from us… nothing includes us. That is oftentimes the hardest truth to believe. God’s love is not conditional. It is not based on our actions. It is based solely on His kind grace toward undeserving sinners like us.

“We love because He first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19

Our only hope and any ability of ourselves to love can only occur because of God’s great love shown toward us. Because, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8), we have the ability to fulfill the first and second great commandments, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luk 10:27).

Because of this, we have hope & motivation to live the Christian life…

“For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (2 Cor 5:14-15).

Christ’s love compels and motivates us to live, not out of duty trying to pay God back an insurmountable debt, nor out of sheer will power as the law would require of us. It drives and calls us to reciprocate and do actions that would please the One Who gave up all for us. We live for Him.

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal 2:20).

Paul never got over Christ’s love for him. It drove how he lived his life. May that be true for you and me as well!

Here is my prayer for you:

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 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. – Eph 3:14-19

In His Love,

Phil