The Biggest Lie of All

Ephesians 1:4-5 Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure.

Want to know what the biggest lie in the world is? God doesn’t love us. Not really. Not at all. He’s mostly just out to get us. Like when we misbehave, he’s there with a really big club ready to knock us over the head because we’re all such simple, little, slimy sinners. Is this a lie you’ve believed? Maybe it’s time to stop believing the lies and start thinking about the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Ephesians is a great book in the Bible. It just is because it’s filled with so much gospel and grace and redemption. My favorite part of this book is found in the 1^st chapter, Paul’s Prayer for Spiritual Wisdom.  It’s kind of a long prayer so I’ll just share some highlights. 

I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. vs18

What does God really want us to know? How much he loves us. 

Ephesians 3:17 And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him.  May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love.  And may you have power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, and how deep his love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great your will never fully understand it. 

Why is it so easy to skim over these beautiful words of truth? Because we tend to believe the lies of the devil rather than the truths of God. Think Adam and Eve here – you know the ones who weren’t supposed to eat from that one tree. They believed the lie - the lie that God didn’t really love them or he would have given them this forbidden fruit.  As their descendants we don’t do much better.

Ask most people what they think God is all about and I bet you that many will say something negative. But look again at that verse above. Paul prayed for these Ephesians that they would experience Christ’s love, a love that is too great to ever fully understand.

So what does God want us to know? To really know – that he loves us, unconditionally, unwaveringly, unabashedly. His love isn’t lukewarm. It isn’t here today and gone tomorrow. No, it’s the kind of love you and I will search for our whole lives. And if we try to find it anywhere but in him we will completely miss out on the best kind of love that anyone could give – eternal love.