Dave’s Monday Blast – December 30, 2024
Greetings from Tennessee – this the last Monday of 2024. Happy New Year! May God grant us His favor and return to take us home to be with Him in 2025.
As we leave 2024 behind and enter into another new year, I want to encourage you to make 2025 the year where you and I embrace this truth (1 John 4:19): “We love because He first loved us.” The First 15 Daily Devotional comments: “The eyes of God are always set upon us. He looks at us with a smile on His face and love in His heart. Because of who He is, namely His nature of love, He is in constant pursuit of us. His love never relents. His grace is like an ever-flowing river making its way to replenish the earth and those who fill it. The only question that remains is, are we willing to dive in?”
First 15 continues: “If we have one iota of love in our hearts toward God it is because he has loved us first. If we have even an inkling of desire to seek after Him, it is because He has sought after us every moment of our lives.” Friends, if you desire to experience a more intimate relationship with the Lord in 2025 you need to begin with the truth that the God of the universe is intent upon pursuing the same with you. To experience Him is to simply let Him in. To love Him deeply is to be willing to receive His love. Intimacy with God is as pure and simple as breathing.
Deuteronomy 4:29 says, “But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find Him, if you search after Him with all your heart and with all your soul.” Men of INTENTION fully understand that to move forward relationally with the Lord in 2025 we must be all in; hold nothing back. The theologian William St-Thierry commented on I John 4:19 this way: “You first loved us so that we might love you, not because you needed our love, but because we could not be what you created us to be, except by loving you.” As Image Bearers (Genesis 1:27), of God, who is love, we must love to be who we are made to be.
Jim Denison, of the Denison Forum comments: “…as fallen people, we need God’s help to love as we are intended. This is one reason Christmas is so vital to our souls and our society, when we see the length and depth to which our Savior would go in coming to our world to pay for our sins, we are prompted to respond to His love with our love.” As I have commented many times before in this blog at the beginning of another New Year, I am resolved to draw nearer to Him, embracing His love for me, so in turn I can best reflect His image of love to a lost and dying world.
