DIG DEEP
Excavating the Depths of God and His Glorious Riches
August 3rd, 2022
God’s Extravagant Love
Matthew 6:21, ‘”For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’ (NIV)
The other day, we learned there is vast spiritual wealth available to each one of us who call ourselves Christians, who consider ourselves children of God. It is buried just under the surface of the Christian life, waiting to be discovered and drawn out. This month we are headed on a dig, so we can explore, excavate and extract the glorious riches God has for His children.
To begin our excavation, we must try to understand the depths of God’s love for us, which is an initial portrayal of our spiritual wealth. While we were still lost, messy and broken, God sent His only unique Son, of royal priesthood, to die for us, or as Romans 5:8, in the Message, translates it, ‘But God put His love on the line for us by offering His Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatsoever to Him.’
Since the beginning of mankind, God has yearned for relationship. God did not manufacture some robots to carry out His demands to beautify a broken world. God dreamt about you and me! He cultivated a garden for us to enjoy, designed a world, and He saw fit to have us in it. Excessively and intensely, He created a place for relationship with Him to grow and flourish. Then the unimaginable happened. This beautiful, unadulterated and shameless bond between Holy God and mankind was thwarted, and sin and evil entered the picture through deception and lies from the enemy of our souls. Satan still to this day desires more than anything to be above this God of the Universe, and His damning quest of that is what God’s matchless, intense love toward us is all about.
The God of the Universe, the One Who breathed all this—and more—into existence, happens to be madly in love with you and with me. The schemes of the deceptive soul-snatcher were not—and never will be—any match for God’s love for His humanity. Even when it cost Him His only Son, He didn’t stop there. And until He has redeemed mankind, redeemed all that the enemy has stolen, only then will He stop. He is on a mining mission for our souls, and within our souls, He has buried deep treasure: nuggets of His exorbitant and costly love.
How He loves us, and the depths of His love toward you and me, is absurd, really, because it is unimaginable and inconceivable and undefinable. Think on your love toward the person you most love in your lifetime and multiply times nth degree, and even still you cannot know His love for you. It cost Him His Son, it caused Him endless pursuit of you; it sacrificed everything to save us so that the enemy couldn’t have us, nor could he take our eternity with God the Father away. Now, that is deep love, undeniable passion, and essentially, even though we have been digging deeply in unearthing this today, there is really no way to fathom the depth of God the Father’s extravagant love for His children.
2 Corinthians 2:10b: ‘The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God had planned all along.’ (MSG)
