gracEmail
Edward Fudge

TOO GOOD TO BELIEVE?
A gentle and moral man with whom I shared the gospel listened attentively, then replied, "That is just too good to believe. I cannot believe that it could really be true."

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The incredibly good news of the gospel is that God loves sinners. Not sinners who get their act together. Not those who clean up their lives. Not those who make amends for their errors. Not those who help themselves. God loves sinners who are helpless, rebellious and uninterested in being loved (Rom. 5:6, 8, 10). Because he loves these sinners, God has every intention of changing them for the better. He loves them far too much to leave them as they are. But that is the order of things, in time and in causation -- God loves sinners and he changes them -- not the other way around.

God does not love sinners because they do anything which calls for his love. He does not even love sinners because Jesus died for them. Instead, God "so loved" the world of sinners "that he gave his only Son" (John 3:16). Jesus' death did not create God's love for sinners. It demonstrated the divine love -- love which we will never be able to understand or to explain (1 John 4:9). God loved sinners before the world began. Then, at just the right time in his own sovereign plan, God sent his Son into the world to be our Savior (2 Tim. 1:9-10). That is how much he loved us.

Because God loves us so much, he instructs us to stop sinning and to live for him. To live pure lives. To treat people fairly and unselfishly (Titus 2:11-12; 3:3-8). Christ's love constrains us to do those things (2 Cor. 5:14-15). But he does not wait to love us until we do them. We do them because we believe his love shown to us in Christ. As the children's song says:

"Jesus loves me when I'm good,
And I do the things I should.
Jesus loves me when I'm bad,
But it makes him very sad."

Some people might be good because they hope to entice God's love in return. But those who are most successful at living rightly respond to a motivation far stronger than that. They know and believe that God loves them, and they do not want to make him sad (1 John 4:10, 19). Nothing in all the universe can separate those people from God's love in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:35, 38-39).

For more about God's heart of grace, click here.