Posted 11:18 AM Jan 29 in Posts / Gloria Copeland
0 CommentsLove Covers Everything!
God Loves us! That is the most important, life-changing truth you and I could ever know! Believe it! God's love covers everything in our lives. His live is the power behind our faith (Galatians 5:6). Love is His motivation for everything He has done through Jesus to make all things possible for us. His love is contained in every word He has ever spoken. And His love for us is the reason Jesus came to open the way for our healthy lives, our overflowing finances and our complete deliverance from the power of the devil.
Love provides everything that contributes to our eternal, abundant life!
When we believe in Jesus, the love of our heavenly Father comes in and affects everything in our lives. And as we begin to walk in His love, our lives begin to take on the characteristics of heaven. A life yielded to the love of God truly becomes heaven on earth…a life that loves as it has been loved.
Because He loves us, He has made the way for us to be able to love Him. Not only that, when we begin to see ourselves through His eyes of love, we can actually begin to love ourselves. And to top it all off, He has given us the desire and the power to love every person He brings into our lives.
We can fully accept ourselves and others, when we get a clear picture that Christ gave His life for all. That’s the essence of love!
Love Is a Wonderful Thing
It’s a wonderful thing to live in the unshakable confidence of God’s love! That kind of confidence comes only when you stay in the Word until you’re totally convinced that God loves and cares for you, and then continue to stay in the Word!
Your faith in His unconditional love can’t help but grow as you spend time with Him in His Word. When you get a firm grip on God’s all-encompassing love for you, receiving it fully and relying on it to empower your faith, your life will never be the same!
Knowing we have that unconditional love and care of the heavenly Father brings out something in us that we may never have experienced before. His love for us draws out our love for Him. First John 4:19 becomes clear to us: “We love Him because He first loved us” (New King James Version).
Our relationship with our heavenly Father takes on new levels of understanding and freedom. We begin to see we can walk free of fear. We don’t have to be afraid of God anymore, and we don’t have anything to fear from the world or the devil. When we know He loves us, we can believe Him…we can take Him at His word.
We can know that because He loves us, He will keep us moving in the right direction and on the right path—the path He had planned for us all along! And we can know, beyond any doubt, that the unconditional love of God provides for every need or desire we may have in our hearts.
So, today I encourage you to sit down with God’s Word and spend time discovering and receiving all the great things His love holds for you. First John 4 is a good place to start, because it shows us clearly how God manifested His love,and how we are to respond to that love.
He Started It!
First John 4:9-10, NLT, tells us: “God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”
God’s love is all wrapped up in Jesus! We see that in verse 10—this is real love—He loved us first! God starts the journey of every man, woman and child who receives the word of His love. Think about how you started on your own journey with God. Maybe you were on an intense search for God. Or maybe you were just going along minding your own business. But one day you heard about how God loved you and gave His Son for you! And everything changed!
I will always remember the testimony I heard about a prison inmate who was about 70 years old. He was watching TV one day and just “happened” to catch the closing of one of our Believer’s Voice of Victory broadcasts. All he heard was Ken saying, “God loves you, even you.” This was a man who had been in prison for years and years. Everyone hated him, he hated himself and was disgusted with life.
Well, he prayed for salvation with Ken that day, and he heard and received Jesus into his life. He received God’s love. At 70, God started his life all over again. He became a Partner with us and began to grow in the Word and in God’s love. He had become a free man right in the middle of prison because he learned that nothing could keep God’s love from him…or keep him from God’s love. Miraculously, within months his sentence was commuted and he walked out of prison a changed man—a man with a fresh start because he heard and received God’s love from Him!
For that man, and for all of us, life takes on new meaning and purpose when we get ahold of the truth that God loves us. Through His Word, He reveals to us who we really are. We can see ourselves as accepted and valued and, to our heavenly Father, worth the highest price He could ever pay. We get on the road to actually loving ourselves because He loves us so much.
Ken and I have discovered through the years that God’s love is the starting place—the fuel—of faith! When we began our walk of faith in God’s Word, our lives were revolutionized. We took hold of the Word and we have never let go. And we have learned that it was God’s love that led us right into this life of faith.
Through His Word, we realized that faith starts with God’s love for us—that our faith grows by the Word because of His love in us. And we now know that the ultimate purpose of our faith is His love flowing through us…right into the lives of the people in our lives! What a great plan for love!
Now It’s Our Turn
Let’s read some more from 1 John 4:
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us. And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in him. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we are like Christ here in this world. Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear…. We love each other as a result of his loving us first. If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen? And God himself has commanded that we must love not only him but our Christian brothers and sisters, too (verses 11-13, 16-21, NLT).
In these verses—actually in the whole book of 1 John—the apostle is bringing more light to Jesus’ great command when he said: Love the Lord, love your neighbors as you love yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). Love is what God has always been all about!
And once He is in us by the Spirit (1 John 4:13), His love is in us, and it’s our turn to love. Look at verse 12 again…when we love each other His love is fully expressed.
He loves—we love! We have received His nature of love. Verse 17 in the King James Version ends by saying, “as he is, so are we in this world.” What He is, we are! He is love in this whole world, and we are love in our world.
By God’s Spirit who lives in you, you have everything right inside you to be love to the people in your life, expressing His love right in the face of every challenge of their lives. And as you express His love, you actually give them a connection to Him and the path to resolution to their challenges.
The day Ken expressed the love of God on that TV broadcast, that 70-year-old man in prison who needed love was connected to God, and his life changed! We get testimonies every day from people all over the world who have the same need to be loved, and who have made the same connection to God when they discovered He loves them. And when they did, their lives began to change!
So, how do we get there? How do we arrive at that place where we are as He is in this world? Look at 1 John 4:13 again—God has given us His Spirit!
The Spirit of Love Himself lives in us. The Spirit is in us to keep us aware of and in tune with God’s love for us—when we realized our need for Him, He was right there with His love. And the Spirit in us keeps us aware of the need for love every person has. He gives us every opportunity to express God’s love to them—to connect them to His love. What a privilege!
As He Is, So Are We
When we go through the door of love that Jesus opened for us, we begin to walk out the life of love. The walk is an amazing one, filled with opportunities to be the full expression of God’s love in our world. We become living proof of God’s love!
As He is, so are we!
What does His love in me look like, exactly? Paul answers the question in 1 Corinthians 13. Here’s his snapshot of love in action—what a life walking in love looks like from verses
4-8, The Amplified Bible:
Love endures long and is patient and kind; love never is envious nor boils over with jealousy, is not boastful or vainglorious, does not display itself haughtily. It is not conceited (arrogant and inflated with pride); it is not rude (unmannerly) and does not act unbecomingly. Love (God’s love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking;it is not touchy or fretful or resentful;it takes no account of the evil done to it [it pays no attention to a suffered wrong]. It does not rejoice at injustice and unrighteousness, but rejoices when right and truth prevail. Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening]. Love never fails [never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end].
Do you get the picture? Do you believe it? Go ahead and believe it! It’s a picture of who you really are in the Spirit! When we look at that picture of love, we need to see ourselves in it. First, we need to see that God has poured out His love on us in every aspect of this picture. Once we see that picture, we should see the Spirit of God in us, throughout those verses. We should see ourselves as kindness, patience, bearing up under anything, never failing—and everything else love is!
Start speaking the truth that’s in the picture over yourself! Keep the picture in front of you. Keep saying it over yourself,and you will find yourself walking out the love that’s in you!
The love in you will forgive people just like God forgave us in Jesus (Ephesians 4:32). This love of God in you will cover them—the multitude of their sin and failure.The love will begin to see through their actions to the hurts and failures in their lives. You will find yourself having compassion on them rather than judging them. The love will become an intercessor for the people you encounter. The love will make you a channel of the blessing of God; when He speaks to you to help someone, the love will always be ready to bless!
You see, God’s love truly covers everything and everyone. Through you and me—each of us a unique expression of His love in this world…each of us cooperating with Him by the Spirit—God is connecting to the hurting, helpless, hopeless people in His world.
I am glad to be as He is in this world, aren’t you? In Jesus,God covered everything and everyone in the world with His complete and all-encompassing love. And through you and
me, He makes sure His love covers things in our little cornerof the world!
Let’s get out there and find someone to love!
Love provides everything that contributes to our eternal, abundant life!
When we believe in Jesus, the love of our heavenly Father comes in and affects everything in our lives. And as we begin to walk in His love, our lives begin to take on the characteristics of heaven. A life yielded to the love of God truly becomes heaven on earth…a life that loves as it has been loved.
Because He loves us, He has made the way for us to be able to love Him. Not only that, when we begin to see ourselves through His eyes of love, we can actually begin to love ourselves. And to top it all off, He has given us the desire and the power to love every person He brings into our lives.
We can fully accept ourselves and others, when we get a clear picture that Christ gave His life for all. That’s the essence of love!
Love Is a Wonderful Thing
It’s a wonderful thing to live in the unshakable confidence of God’s love! That kind of confidence comes only when you stay in the Word until you’re totally convinced that God loves and cares for you, and then continue to stay in the Word!
Your faith in His unconditional love can’t help but grow as you spend time with Him in His Word. When you get a firm grip on God’s all-encompassing love for you, receiving it fully and relying on it to empower your faith, your life will never be the same!
Knowing we have that unconditional love and care of the heavenly Father brings out something in us that we may never have experienced before. His love for us draws out our love for Him. First John 4:19 becomes clear to us: “We love Him because He first loved us” (New King James Version).
Our relationship with our heavenly Father takes on new levels of understanding and freedom. We begin to see we can walk free of fear. We don’t have to be afraid of God anymore, and we don’t have anything to fear from the world or the devil. When we know He loves us, we can believe Him…we can take Him at His word.
We can know that because He loves us, He will keep us moving in the right direction and on the right path—the path He had planned for us all along! And we can know, beyond any doubt, that the unconditional love of God provides for every need or desire we may have in our hearts.
So, today I encourage you to sit down with God’s Word and spend time discovering and receiving all the great things His love holds for you. First John 4 is a good place to start, because it shows us clearly how God manifested His love,and how we are to respond to that love.
He Started It!
First John 4:9-10, NLT, tells us: “God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”
God’s love is all wrapped up in Jesus! We see that in verse 10—this is real love—He loved us first! God starts the journey of every man, woman and child who receives the word of His love. Think about how you started on your own journey with God. Maybe you were on an intense search for God. Or maybe you were just going along minding your own business. But one day you heard about how God loved you and gave His Son for you! And everything changed!
I will always remember the testimony I heard about a prison inmate who was about 70 years old. He was watching TV one day and just “happened” to catch the closing of one of our Believer’s Voice of Victory broadcasts. All he heard was Ken saying, “God loves you, even you.” This was a man who had been in prison for years and years. Everyone hated him, he hated himself and was disgusted with life.
Well, he prayed for salvation with Ken that day, and he heard and received Jesus into his life. He received God’s love. At 70, God started his life all over again. He became a Partner with us and began to grow in the Word and in God’s love. He had become a free man right in the middle of prison because he learned that nothing could keep God’s love from him…or keep him from God’s love. Miraculously, within months his sentence was commuted and he walked out of prison a changed man—a man with a fresh start because he heard and received God’s love from Him!
For that man, and for all of us, life takes on new meaning and purpose when we get ahold of the truth that God loves us. Through His Word, He reveals to us who we really are. We can see ourselves as accepted and valued and, to our heavenly Father, worth the highest price He could ever pay. We get on the road to actually loving ourselves because He loves us so much.
Ken and I have discovered through the years that God’s love is the starting place—the fuel—of faith! When we began our walk of faith in God’s Word, our lives were revolutionized. We took hold of the Word and we have never let go. And we have learned that it was God’s love that led us right into this life of faith.
Through His Word, we realized that faith starts with God’s love for us—that our faith grows by the Word because of His love in us. And we now know that the ultimate purpose of our faith is His love flowing through us…right into the lives of the people in our lives! What a great plan for love!
Now It’s Our Turn
Let’s read some more from 1 John 4:
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us. And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in him. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we are like Christ here in this world. Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear…. We love each other as a result of his loving us first. If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen? And God himself has commanded that we must love not only him but our Christian brothers and sisters, too (verses 11-13, 16-21, NLT).
In these verses—actually in the whole book of 1 John—the apostle is bringing more light to Jesus’ great command when he said: Love the Lord, love your neighbors as you love yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). Love is what God has always been all about!
And once He is in us by the Spirit (1 John 4:13), His love is in us, and it’s our turn to love. Look at verse 12 again…when we love each other His love is fully expressed.
He loves—we love! We have received His nature of love. Verse 17 in the King James Version ends by saying, “as he is, so are we in this world.” What He is, we are! He is love in this whole world, and we are love in our world.
By God’s Spirit who lives in you, you have everything right inside you to be love to the people in your life, expressing His love right in the face of every challenge of their lives. And as you express His love, you actually give them a connection to Him and the path to resolution to their challenges.
The day Ken expressed the love of God on that TV broadcast, that 70-year-old man in prison who needed love was connected to God, and his life changed! We get testimonies every day from people all over the world who have the same need to be loved, and who have made the same connection to God when they discovered He loves them. And when they did, their lives began to change!
So, how do we get there? How do we arrive at that place where we are as He is in this world? Look at 1 John 4:13 again—God has given us His Spirit!
The Spirit of Love Himself lives in us. The Spirit is in us to keep us aware of and in tune with God’s love for us—when we realized our need for Him, He was right there with His love. And the Spirit in us keeps us aware of the need for love every person has. He gives us every opportunity to express God’s love to them—to connect them to His love. What a privilege!
As He Is, So Are We
When we go through the door of love that Jesus opened for us, we begin to walk out the life of love. The walk is an amazing one, filled with opportunities to be the full expression of God’s love in our world. We become living proof of God’s love!
As He is, so are we!
What does His love in me look like, exactly? Paul answers the question in 1 Corinthians 13. Here’s his snapshot of love in action—what a life walking in love looks like from verses
4-8, The Amplified Bible:
Love endures long and is patient and kind; love never is envious nor boils over with jealousy, is not boastful or vainglorious, does not display itself haughtily. It is not conceited (arrogant and inflated with pride); it is not rude (unmannerly) and does not act unbecomingly. Love (God’s love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking;it is not touchy or fretful or resentful;it takes no account of the evil done to it [it pays no attention to a suffered wrong]. It does not rejoice at injustice and unrighteousness, but rejoices when right and truth prevail. Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening]. Love never fails [never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end].
Do you get the picture? Do you believe it? Go ahead and believe it! It’s a picture of who you really are in the Spirit! When we look at that picture of love, we need to see ourselves in it. First, we need to see that God has poured out His love on us in every aspect of this picture. Once we see that picture, we should see the Spirit of God in us, throughout those verses. We should see ourselves as kindness, patience, bearing up under anything, never failing—and everything else love is!
Start speaking the truth that’s in the picture over yourself! Keep the picture in front of you. Keep saying it over yourself,and you will find yourself walking out the love that’s in you!
The love in you will forgive people just like God forgave us in Jesus (Ephesians 4:32). This love of God in you will cover them—the multitude of their sin and failure.The love will begin to see through their actions to the hurts and failures in their lives. You will find yourself having compassion on them rather than judging them. The love will become an intercessor for the people you encounter. The love will make you a channel of the blessing of God; when He speaks to you to help someone, the love will always be ready to bless!
You see, God’s love truly covers everything and everyone. Through you and me—each of us a unique expression of His love in this world…each of us cooperating with Him by the Spirit—God is connecting to the hurting, helpless, hopeless people in His world.
I am glad to be as He is in this world, aren’t you? In Jesus,God covered everything and everyone in the world with His complete and all-encompassing love. And through you and
me, He makes sure His love covers things in our little cornerof the world!
Let’s get out there and find someone to love!
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