The greatest evidence of God’s love for us is the simple but amazing fact that He created us at all.  Being God, he knew how we would turn from him, and that it would cost the life of his precious Son in order to redeem us back to Himself to continue the relationship He so desired.  If you ever have any doubt that God loves you, think about the price He was willing to pay for a relationship with you…His creation.

We’ve all heard the statements before.  He looks just like his dad.  She looks just like her mother.  Do the people around us get a glimpse of God our Father-His love, His mercy and grace, His goodness-by the way we live our lives?  While we cannot be an exact representation of God, our lives-what we say and how we act-need to give people around us a glimpse of who God is.

I believe that, like me, many of you enjoy the beginning of a new year.  It is a time of new beginnings and starting with a clean slate.  We can forget what is in the past, and start a new year fresh.  I don’t know for sure, but it may be something that God has put inside all of us….the joy and freedom to start all over again.  One of His precious promises is that we have access to a new supply of God’s mercy every morning.  By nature, I am a sinful creature, so I am very thankful that He states His mercies are new every morning(Lamentations 3:23).  The entire passage (Lamentation 3:19-23) gives us all great hope.  Without God and His mercy, none of us would have any hope in this life.  So, as we begin this new year, let’s rejoice that we can wake up each morning knowing that we can count on a new and endless supply of God’s mercy!

As we go into the New Year, this is a good thought to meditate on.  The Old Testament and the New Testament give us a stark contrast of what we are without Christ, and what we are with and because of Him.  The Old Testament tells us that our righteousness is as filthy rags, that our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and that all the thoughts and intents of our hearts are evil all the time.  In sharp contrast, the New Testament tells us what we are because of Christ and His sacrifice.  The New Testament tells us that He is the one who is able to keep us from falling, and to present us before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy;  that He is the one who-after we have suffered a while-will complete and make us what we ought to be;  and that we can work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, because He is at work in us giving us both the desire and the power to do of His good pleasure.

So, we fall on our faces before God and ask for His forgiveness that was bought for us by Christ’s sacrifice.  But, we also celebrate what we can become because of the gift and sacrifice that Jesus made for all of us.

We are well into the Christmas season.  As the song writer stated, ‘it is the most wonderful time of the year.’  What we are celebrating, the birth of Jesus the Son of God, makes it the most wonderful time of the year.  Jesus is the reason for the season, and his birth-his coming to earth-is what makes it the most wonderful time of the year.

Every morning the sun rises is and should be a reminder to us of the faithfulness of our Father.  It also speaks to us of His power.  He spoke one word, ‘let their be light,’ and it has been so ever since.  He is faithful and powerful enough to take care of us each and every day.

God, being love itself, created us so that He could have a people with which He could have a relationship-a very close, intimate relationship.  But, God being God, also knew the end from the beginning, and knew that we His creation could not maintain a relationship with Him on our own.  He knew that it was going to cost the life of His Son, in order that we could have that relationship with Him.  Despite knowing this cost, He created us to have a relationship with us, and He made the ultimate sacrifice needed by giving His Son.  He demonstrated extraordinary love by His sacrifice, and ultimately showed us the love of a Father.  There is no greater love than this.

While God does not usually overwhelm us with His power, although He easily could, He frequently overwhelms us with His love.  He demonstrated His overwhelming love by creating us, and creating us with the express intent of having a personal relationship with each of us.  We could not maintain that relationship with God by ourselves, and God again showed His overwhelming love for us by sending His son as a sacrifice for our sins so that our relationship with God could be restored.  Because of this gift, we the children of our Father, are able to have a relationship with the creator of all things!

You may or may not have had a father that showed you how much he loved you all the time.  This dancing Father you have, your Father in heaven, loves you very much and is thinking about you all the time.  He tells us in Psalm 139 that His thoughts about us outnumber the grains of sand.  Just as His plans for us are good, His thoughts about us are good.  David called God’s thoughts towards him precious;  and Isaiah tells us that God calls us precious, and that He loves us.   We are the ones who should be dancing because of this loving Father we have.

  “How great Thou art” is one of the best loved hymns, and I believe there is a reason for that.  It is the song of all of God’s children.  The writer of the lyrics was doing his best to describe just how great God is.  God is so great, our words are really not adequate to fully express the greatness of His love, His mercy, His power, and His holiness.  The writer used nature as a way to describe the greatness of God.  He also used the death and resurrection of God’s own son to describe the incredible love, mercy, and greatness of God towards His children.  So, as the song tells us, when we reach heaven (our home) and see Him (the one who made all things possible), we will bow down, and with great joy sing and tell of all His greatness.