Why I Love God - He Gives Great Gifts!

More than likely in the coming weeks you will be hitting the stores in search of the perfect gifts for the people whom you love. The holiday season is a time where we show our love and appreciation for the people in our lives whom we hold dear. If asked, most people would likely admit they enjoy receiving gifts and feel it is a great way to express appreciation and love to someone.

As great as getting gifts from friends and family is, they all pale in comparison to the wonderful gifts showered upon us by our Father in Heaven. If we were to take inventory of our blessings, it would not take long for us to realize how good God is. Unfortunately we often miss out on appreciating the great gifts God gives to us because we focus on what we don't have. Christians ought to be a people who are thankful and excited about our many blessings.

The fact that every good thing that I have comes from God causes me to love Him more each day, consider “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17). Rusty mentioned in his Sunday lesson that not only has God blessed us greatly up to this point in our lives, but he will continue to do so! What a wonderful feeling it is to know that God will never turn His back on us or decide that we have had “enough blessings,” and turn off the valve!

We have a responsibility of using those blessings to serve God and others. The great truth is when we use our blessings to serve and honor God, He will give us even more to serve and honor Him with! Consider what Luke says in Luke 6:38, “give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

Take a quick inventory of your blessings, are you using them to serve God and bless others?

Why I Love God - He Provides For Me

It is not hard to love someone who takes care of you. When you think about your parents, or your spouse, one of the reasons it is easy to love them is because of all the ways they provide for you. When it comes to taking care of our needs, there is nobody better to look to than God!

God knows each of our needs, better than we know them. Consider the words of Matthew 6:8, “...for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” What a source of comfort it should be to have a Father who knows what we need in life before we even think to ask on our own! I know there are many times in my life that I don’t know what I need, how wonderful it is to serve a God who knows exactly what is needed.

Knowing that God is ready and willing to take care of me causes me to love him all the more! One of the common feelings in life is worry. As humans, we worry about many things, often times needlessly. Often times we find ourselves worrying about our jobs, our finances, or our health. Consider what Matthew 6:25-27, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?” If God is so good as to take care of the birds, we can know he will take care of us also! What a great comfort and blessing!

Friends, we should love God for many reasons! Certainly the very fact that he provides for our needs is a great reason to love our Heavenly Father. Our love and thankfulness for his provisions should cause us to have a deep devotion to Him. Our love for God is tied directly to our obedience to Him (John 14:15). If your obedience to God was used as a barometer to measure your love for Him, how would it measure up.

Let us each strive to love God more each day as we show our thankfulness for His provision!