SECRET #3 OF FOLLOWING JESUS

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After setting up SECRETS #1 and #2 as the foundational two secrets-the secrets all the other principles build upon, I threw you a bit of a curve yesterday. I pointed out a third direction of love-God's love for you-that serves as the real underpinning of your love for God and your love for your neighbor.

Since God is love, it only makes sense that the visible expression of God through Jesus would express this same dynamic. Jesus is all about love within a relationship with Him and seeks a relationship with anyone who wants it. Whoever receives this message of God's love possesses the most revolutionary reality a person could ever experience-peace, acceptance, no guilt, the abiding presence of God, and the greatest empowerment ever imagined!

So SECRET #3 is: The follower of Jesus comes to know and accept God's unconditional love for him. I have delineated this secret into seven parts: 1. God loves you unconditionally. There is nothing you can do to earn the love of God. He loves you just as you are and there is nothing you can do to stop Him.

2. God made you to be special with a special mission. You are so unique with a DNA address that identifies and separates you from everyone else in the world.

3. God searches you out like being in a courtship. He is courting you as a lover. All He is looking for is some sort of response to His love. Do you reciprocate this love back to Him or are you ignoring or snubbing His gestures toward you?

4. God is relentless until He finds you to help you back on track. This is what Jesus was teaching, when He taught of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the lost or Prodigal son. God knows your heart is restless, until you find your rest in Him. He created you to be in relationship with Him-to be dependent upon Him as your Creator. If you ignore this purpose of the Creator, you will find yourself in a dependent mode on something or someone else. Then, you will be serving other gods and not the God.

5. God does not threaten you-not dangling you over the threat of hell. Most have been urged at one time or another to turn to God and avoid going to hell. Turn or burn has been the theme! God does not want you to live with this sort of threat and fear. This is why Jesus spent His time seeking out the lost, the down-and-out, the broken and the sinners. And Jesus did so with the greatest expressions of love. He only threatened the religious leadership and the haughty do-gooders. God wants a personal relationship with you through Jesus forever and forever can begin right now!

6. God set up all of the laws of the universe for your benefit. They are set up to help you live life to the fullest-to bring a more abundant life. You break those laws of the universe, you didn't just break God's laws; violation of those laws will break you.

7. God relates to people through Jesus. Jesus is the Good News that you can have a relationship with the Creator-God of the universe. In a very real sense, Jesus is the love-letter God sent to you to connect you up with God's love! It's your own personal relationship with your Creator through Jesus. This is why Jesus announced that He didn't come to condemn the world; He came to convince the world of the truth about God and the possible relationship with Him. Unfortunately, Christians seem to take on the primary job of condemning everyone else, contrary to the intent and heart of God through Jesus.

We get some insight into what Jesus believed about God's love for you in His prayer to the Father. He says: "The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. "Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. "O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:22-26)

Then I think it's interesting to note what Paul's conclusion was about the love of God for those who are followers of Jesus. He says: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

SECRET #3 is the most basic and overriding secret of all: The follower of Jesus comes to know and accept God's unconditional love for him. Well, how's it going? Are you beginning to get the picture that God loves you no matter what? Think it over and then think it over again!