The Holiness of God (How can he love me when he judges me?)
“This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all.” -1 John 1:5 NLT
- I want to talk to you about dogs.
- How many of you have a dog or has had a dog in your lifetime?
I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a master and his dog. I need a name for them, who has a name? (let students name dog and master)
Ok, the master loved his dog very very much, raised him from a puppy, it was his best friend. One day the dog hurts his paw and it causes an open wound. It hurts and so to relieve the pain the dog starts gnawing on his paw. It feels good to the dog, but master knows that the more the dog gnaws on his paw, the worse it’s going to get. Eventually he knows it’ll get infected and ultimately could kill the dog. So when the dog starts gnawing, master tells him “No! Bad dog!”. When the dog starts gnawing again, the master takes his newspaper and spanks the dog. This hurts the dog. The dog can’t understand why master, who loves him so much, is giving him consequences and not letting him do what feels good.
- Why does master do this?
- Does he still love his dog?
This is an analogy for God. He loves us so much that he can’t stand sin. We were made like him, sin isn’t supposed to be in our lives. When we do, God knows that it is hurting and killing us.
If the Master said, “No it’s okay dog, you can just do what you want, I forgive you”, but then did nothing to remove the things that’s killing us, would that be loving?
God judges us, but he does it out of love because he takes responsibility for his people.
He went a step further and knowing that we couldn’t heal or clean ourselves, The master cleaned our wounds with soap so they wouldn’t kill us. Like we talked about last week, Jesus is that soap.
Next week we are going to talk about Love and how love demands sacrifice.
(Close in Prayer)
-Cyndi Engle