Lesson 45: Accepting and Loving God for Who He Is

  • So many people want to believe in a God who conforms to their own preconceptions and desires about who He should be and what He should be like.

  • They also want to interpret God’s word in ways that justify their own sinful behavior and preferences. They like to say that what is in the Bible is out of date and not relevant today, or needs to be reinterpreted to fit our times.

  • The religious leaders in Christ’s time had the same problem; though He interpreted the scriptures written by God’s prophets and performed miracles that they witnessed, they killed Christ because neither He nor His words conformed to their preconceived beliefs and biases.

  • Many people today reject the true, living God and His word because they don’t conform to what they want to hear.

  • God’s long suffering patience with us should serve as our role model for behavior toward each other.

Random Notes:

Whatever pain and struggles we endure, Christ doesn’t claim He will solve our problems, but He does say He will be with us to strengthen and guide us.

His grace is larger than any of our circumstances in which we suffer. We need to turn to Him always, trusting in His wise goodness.

Random Note:

When we receive Jesus as our Savior we then are given His Holy Spirit to help us desire to live lives of righteousness. To receive Jesus we need faith. God uses a number of means for us to have this faith; such as His word as given in the Bible and as heard in sermons. When people accept His word and believe it they receive the faith they need to receive Jesus. Many people find His word nonsense, and by an act of their own will reject the only means that God gives them to have the faith necessary to accept Jesus. God sees that everyone gets what they want, either a relationship with Him through Christ or a life and an eternity without Him.