God’s Love – goodchristianfiction

Love from God’s Perspective

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Often when I pray, I like to take a moment to ponder all that God has done to make it possible for me to come into His presence. I especially appreciate this privilege when I read about the journey God’s chosen people took from slavery in Egypt to the fulfillment of God’s loving covenant, first in the Promised Land and ultimately in the sacrifice Jesus made of Himself to free us all from our slavery to sin and tie us to the Reverent Holiness of God.

But I’ve jumped ahead of myself because God’s love for us, as well as His desire to be in relationship with us, has its roots in the very beginning, when He created man and woman to care for all that He created. In the beginning, God even walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve, conversing with them without having to shield them from His full glory.

Unfortunately, this privilege was short-lived, for once Adam and Eve broke their bond with God by taking from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, they lost the ability to walk in step with God, who is all Holy. Having partaken of the fruit that revealed goodness and evil to their innocent minds, Adam and Eve were no longer innocent, but rather sinners in need of redemption before an all-Holy God, sinners who could not enter into the presence of God and expect to live.

Banned from their perfect life because of their own choices, Adam and Eve learn the hard way that life without holiness, life that is enslaved to sin, is a hard, cruel life. One son slays another. Crops fail. Childbirth sometimes leads to death. And through it all, how much they must have longed for the luscious Garden and those cool, loving walks with their Creator God.

Once we took that step away from God’s holiness, the further we fell into darkness, that existence in sin that takes us farther and farther away from God. At some point, humans fell into such depravity and so far away from God, that He chose to destroy the planet and start all over again, washing away every living thing in a flood that covered the earth. Except for Noah, whom God chose because of Noah’s faithfulness to the Lord, all other families were wiped out. Only Noah’s family, gathered in the Ark God told Noah to build, survived the torrential rain lasting 40 days, as well as the many months it took for the earth to dry out again.

When animals and humans alike descended from the ark to begin human history on earth anew, God was there, loving us and longing for us to seek relationship with Him. The Bible tells us He makes a covenant with Noah, his sons, and every living thing on earth, promising never to flood the earth again. He even places a rainbow in the sky as a sign that He would never again use a flood to destroy us, the rainbow serving as a reminder to us and to God of this covenant.

God cements His love for all humanity when He makes a covenant with a faithful and devout man named Abram (later known as Abraham). God promises Abram, a childless man well past the prime of life, that God will make him into a nation whose descendants will number beyond all the grains of sand on the seashore. God also promises to bless all of humanity through Abram’s direct line of descent, a promise that comes to full fruition when Jesus, coming from the line of Abraham, gives His perfectly-led life as sacrifice for all the wrath humanity deserves, so that we all may enter into a Holy Covenant with God, one that frees us from our slavery to sin and offers us the gift of the Holy Spirit in us, to guide us and to open the door to that Holy Sanctuary where God sits enthroned, always ready to listen.

I find myself going back and forth between the Old Testament and the New, if you will, because as many times as I have read the Bible, this time reading through the Old Testament, I see the most clearly how much the theme of God’s love is there, in every part of the Bible, even in the Old Testament stories that might seem the most brutal.

As John tells us,

The Word was first,
    the Word present to God,
    God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
    in readiness for God from day one.

Everything was created through him;
    nothing—not one thing!—
    came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
    and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
    the darkness couldn’t put it out.
(John 1:1-5, the Message)

then,

The Word became flesh and blood,
    and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
    the one-of-a-kind glory,
    like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
    true from start to finish.
(John 1:14, the Message)

God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, always there, always working together for the purpose of reuniting the One and Only, Most Holy God with the creations He loves despite all our flaws and failures. Only Jesus on the Cross made atonement for my sinful nature. I am redeemed when I choose to follow Jesus and submit my will to His own. Only by the Holiness granted to us because of our belief in and submission to Christ and His sacrifice for us can we come before God and open up the depths of our hearts. We can “look” upon the Most Holy God and live.

But that only touches the surface of the story of God’s love for us. Next time, I will begin where we have left off. The beginning of the story of God’s chosen people, how He uses Abraham’s descendants to establish Himself as the Most High God in the minds of all humanity, a jealous God who loves us so much He wants us to love Him alone, not the idols and things of this world that distract us from our only, true need: knowing and embracing the love of God.

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by Pixabay:

Christian Living

GOD Doesn’t Have To Be Liked: Part One

Posted on October 26, 2017October 28, 2017 by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

The heart is deceitful and an unreliable guide for life

“I thought spirituality was all about what makes you feel good,” the character on the popular television show, Glee, reasoned, succinctly relating mainstream culture’s definition of God, the feel-good deity of Hollywood and your Facebook feed who desperately desires your friendship. He wants you to live the life you feel in your heart you have been put on the earth to live regardless of any fallout from your choices. He wants you to love and be loved in all its forms with no limits. He wants you to let yourself off the hook for the things you mess up on without taking much time to think about your actions or consequences because He is the “feel-good” God.

The problem with going along with mainstream culture’s definition of God is that the consequences of pursuing what makes you feel good are generally winding up on a never-ending treadmill of reaching for a sense of joy that is ultimately fleeting. When the foundation of your sense of worth is based solely on what you feel, you are subject to the vagaries of the human heart, to the pitfalls of listening to the wrong voices, to believing the negative talk you hear from others and from yourself, negative talk that has no basis in truth. Truth itself is fluid if you base your sense of God on what you feel.

Despite our feelings that the world is continually going downhill, really not much changes. In Biblical times, people also pursued the feel-good gods. Despite the one Lord’s admonition to love Him only, the people also worshipped the wooden idols who promised better crops and emotional pleasure. Ultimately, the result of these actions was that God punished them for that attitude. People in Biblical times who went with the flow of everyone else around them participated in activities that God clearly denounced as wrong. But because most everyone else around them was doing it, most people were content to go with the flow and still think they could rightfully claim they followed GOD.

Even though God loves us so much that He sent His only Son to die for our sins so that we might be saved, God does not require that we actually like Him. In fact, love and worship are a far cry different from like. Think of your family members, for example. You love them because you share the common bonds of blood and childhood memories, but you don’t necessarily like your family all the time. In the same way, God loves us unconditionally, even though most of the time we act in ways He totally dislikes.

Even though God knew I would be judgmental, prone to gossip, a glutton, and an avid television watcher, among so many other sins, even though He knew every act in my life He was going to dislike, Jesus still died on the cross for my sins. He gave His unblemished life so that I could have eternal peace with God.

God’s love has the unique goal of truly longing for our best selves from the perspective of His heavenly, omnipotent knowing. Just as the parent of a teenager has to lay down rules that aren’t popular, God, who sees the biggest picture of all, loves us enough to give us the boundaries required to achieve a heavenly perspective.

Even though these boundaries are clearly defined in the Bible, we humans manage to argue the point, especially when we confuse God’s love for us with a human need to worship a likeable God. God isn’t very likeable when He tells us not to have sex outside the bounds of marriage or when He insists that marriage should be an unbreakable vow between a woman and a man. He isn’t likeable when He proclaims His right to be the one and only God in our lives so that we should not make idols of other people, like movie stars, or earthly things, such as our possessions.

But God’s love for us trumps any need to like or be liked. Knowing the true God requires us to strip away the layers of our cultural influences, to seek Him in quiet places and learn to listen for His voice. We have to know His Word, all of it, and not just the parts of it that we tend to agree with. If we diligently seek Him, we will be less prone to being led astray by the popular thinking that swirls around us, by the pressures of society to just get along no matter the cost to God’s truth.

It’s wise to regularly take an inventory of your perspective of our awesome God. Are you standing in the truth of God’s love, which encompasses His discipline as well as His compassion, or are you accepting popular culture’s feel-good description of a likeable God? Your growth as a Christian depends on you knowing the difference.

There’s another important component to this concept of a likeable versus a loving God, and that is how we humans fumble through trying to love like Jesus loves. Too often, we only manage to project a condemning and judgmental God who ostracizes instead of encompasses. This alienating approach to making people understand our loving God does Him a great disservice and keeps so many from really hearing the message of God’s true Word.

Next time, let’s look more closely at what it really means to love like God loves, including why God’s love, like any true love, includes boundaries that are for the ultimate good of these souls who are perpetually reaching for the perfection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In Christ,
Ramona

Faith

God Gets In The Weeds

Posted on September 25, 2016 by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

I’m sweating like a sinner in church.

It’s an old wisecrack meant to alleviate tension, but it points to an underlying belief about God and especially His followers, the belief that God only really wants to deal with really good people, that He has no tolerance for those who stray from the straight and narrow path. God, and especially His people, don’t like to get their hands dirty.

But these widely-held beliefs could not be further from the truth of our living, loving God. The One who loved us enough to die a humiliating death on the cross for us embraces the wounded, the broken, and those who stumble. He knows more than anyone the imperfections of His creations and loves us anyway.

When we deny that salvation is a gift from God, we fall into the trap of thinking salvation has to be earned by our actions. When we work on the earned-salvation model, we are doomed to make mistakes, doomed to judge ourselves and others, and doomed to lose sight of God in the midst of our efforts to ultimately save ourselves.

We must accept that salvation cannot be earned, that the love of God alone saves us, in order to see the world from a more Godly perspective, to support each other rather than judge, to embrace the imperfections in all of us as an indication of our equality before a perfect God.

God’s love is so great, His willingness to get into the depth and breadth of our indignities so limitless, that our finite brains cannot begin to comprehend it. When Jesus had the power to rule the world and dine with kings, He chose to live as an itinerant and dine with tax collectors and prostitutes, some of the most despised social classes of His time. When Paul held Stephen’s cloak while his compatriots stoned the first Christian martyr to death, God didn’t turn His head, but instead saw the potential in Paul to be one of His greatest crusaders. God is not averse to getting His hands dirty if that is what loving us requires.

We know that God is in the weeds as well as on the mountaintops because God is everywhere:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:7-12)

If we live knowing God gets in the weeds, then perhaps we would do better at tolerating the imperfections in ourselves and others. We would do well to remember that Jesus managed to hold people accountable for their actions without making them feel unloved or de-valued. We would know the difference between truth and petty judgments. Church would be a place where love lifts up sinners instead of making them sweat.

Living by putting God’s love first may seem impossible, but all things are possible with a God who is willing to get down in the dirt with us:

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? (Romans 8:31-32)

The God who loves the humble fosters an open heart in all of us, as well as a desire to do what is good and right. But when we stumble, He is always ready to take our hands and pull us back to our feet again. Finding yourself in the weeds? He’s right there, waiting patiently, for you to find Him.

Christian Fiction, Christian Living

A Name In Lights or In the Light?

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Broadway — Only by losing the self do we truly see our “names in lights.”

I don’t mind if you have something nice to say about me . . . . I want to leave a legacy.

Nichole Nordeman’s song, “Legacy,” explores the concept that God’s idea of success is not the world’s idea of success. Being a fan and knowing the depth of her writing, I can well imagine that this piece is as much a warning to Nichole herself as it is to the listener, for in it, she expresses her great desire to shine the Light of God instead of her own light:

I won’t lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights
We all need an ‘Atta boy’ or ‘Atta girl’
But in the end I’d like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this world.

The legacy Nichole defines in the remainder of the song is very specific: choosing love, pointing to God so that His mark is left on the good she does, leaving offerings out of her abundance, living mercy and grace, and praising God without worrying about what others might think about her. In other words, Nichole defines legacy as a true life lived in Christ, being so committed to shining His light, that our ego or pride gets pushed aside so that God always comes first.

At first, living this way may seem like we have placed our ego on a chair, waiting for an outing that will never happen again. Our egos feel deflated and cast aside. But, at the same time, when we see our egos laid out in this way, we see them for the pathetic things they are. For, what is more lonely than a ball gown and an empty pair of slippers, lying like the promise of something that will never really be as wonderful as one might have imagined?

When we empty ourselves of ourselves, we make room for Love, for the Holy Spirit to fill us and shine for others in a world of darkness. We are calm, strong, patient, merciful, and we always know peace.

This putting aside of the ego is a hard, life-long practice, however. It takes discipline to face each day knowing you plan to pay attention to your inner thoughts, your words, your actions. What motivates you? What does your self-talk revolve around? Are you concerned about being right because it makes you feel better, or are you looking out for what is the rightness of God’s truth, which begins with love and compassion?

Working on my writing is also an act of fighting the ego. I must constantly hold myself to a standard that seeks to shine the right kind of Light. If all I want is to see my name in lights, i.e. write the “great American novel,” then I am no better than any other humanist who has attempted to make herself feel better about herself because somehow I have couched my endeavors in the lingo of making the world a better place. But, if I really believe that God has given me a certain ability with words in order to serve Him, then I have to keep praying that my ego doesn’t get in the way of the messages He wants me to send.

I also have to fight the desire to hole myself up in a corner and write all the time instead of doing some of the other things that a life in Christ requires. Love, mercy, patience, and offerings are not exactly accomplished through written words on the internet or in a book. Balancing the talents God gives us to work for His good is a daily act of saying no to the ego so that our choices are based on God’s needs (which is most often the needs of others) instead of our own wants.

Nichole sums it up best:

Just want to hear instead, “well done, good and faithful one;”
No, I don’t mind if you have something nice to say about me.

Christian Living, Love

The Challenges of Abundance

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

When I was still in junior high school, my sister and I asked our grandmother about what it was like when she finally had things like vacuum cleaners and washing machines to use in her household chores. Had the new gadgets made life easier?

Without batting an eye, my grandmother, who had grown up the daughter of a sharecropper in East Texas during the Depression, lived in one-room houses with packed-dirt floors, and raided pack-rat nests for pecans to sell to the grocer for thread, gave us a quick and emphatic, “NO.”

Instead of reducing her workload, the advent of these electric aids to housework only gave my grandmother more to do!

Today, smartphones are supposed to make our lives easier as well. But, if you are like me, you know that a device that allows you to easily take a phone, email, internet connection, banking interface, social network, endless library, and gaming center wherever you go doesn’t simplify anything at all.

I have finally “smartened up” and put a hiatus on my electric devices after a certain point in the evening (unless I am writing my blog or a novel, of course) in an attempt to reduce the constant strain on my neck. With increased access to everywhere, I am also experiencing increased and unceasing stress!

Our consumer-driven society has given us an addiction to abundance that makes us less likely to slow down, be still, and feel the power of God around us. The challenge of balancing work, family-life, friendships, responsibilities and relaxation may just be the major crisis of our century.

But there is another kind of abundance that brings with it a different set of challenges. I’ll tell you right up front that I like these challenges much better.

The abundance I am talking about is the love of God for us, a love so great that Jesus died for us, accepting the punishment for all our sins when He Himself had done nothing to deserve punishment, so that we might have a chance to accept Him as our Savior and thus achieve salvation.

Christ’s love for us is an abundance that we must be willing to accept with the faith of a small child, and that we should desire to share with others. Christ’s love is a way of being when we interact with it on a daily basis.

How do you meet the challenge of the abundance that comes with a God who loves you so much, He comes to earth in the form of man to be humiliated in the end and crucified for you?

If you really accept this abundance, you will exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul describes it to the Galatians:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law (Galatians 5:22-23).

This abundance of love is something that we humans can so easily take for granted, which means we aren’t as patient with others as we ought to be, we gossip just a little, we watch more television than we spend time in the Word, prayer, fellowship.

In other words, we are very good at proving over and over just how fortunate we are that Jesus was willing to die for us. None of us are perfect. But God’s love for us should make us want to be.

How do we take advantage of the abundance of God’s love? All we have to do is ask:

“Ask and it will be given to you;” Christ tells us, “seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).

But we can also practice the disciplines of love: studying God’s word, praying, being still to listen for God’s direction, being in fellowship with other believers who can help us be accountable to God’s truth, paying attention to our actions and repenting of our sins to God.

Abundance can be as bad as it is good, but in the case of God’s love for us, the abundance of the gift of salvation is certainly uphill all the way.