This was my first time attending the North America College Training (NACT 2023). Before going, I prayed to the Lord that He would really shine in me and gain a breakthrough in my being. I thank the Lord He honoured my prayers and spoke a personal word to me during this time.
Growing up in the church life, I knew that God is love. But how much did I really know that God is love? In the training, I was exposed to see just how much of my human concepts are present concerning this matter.
Some of the concepts I had was: God loves me “…only when I’ve done this” or “…when I am like this”. Other times I felt maybe the Lord does not love me as much as before because I did this or that.
Oh, How we need a fresh seeing of God as love!
Jeremiah 31:3 (RCV) says that “…I have loved you with an eternal love…” God’s love is eternal; it is not bound by time. He knew everything; what we will be, what we would ever do, what we will become. Yet, He created us, He became a man to reach us, He died for us despite Him knowing who we are in our fallen self.
When we touch that God is love, our spontaneous response is to love Him.
1 John 4:19: We love because He first loved us. We may be faced with so many decisions in life that we need to make.
But I was so relieved to see that once we touch the constraining love of Christ, the choice is already made and we are free! So just love Him!
Nothing pleases God so much as for us to realise that He does not want us to do anything; He only wants us to love Him, not with our natural love but with the divine love with which He first loved us with!
I am also touched in this training that our experience of God as love must go on to experience His love corporately.
Ephesians 5:25 reveals to us that Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. But even more, we must go further and higher in our knowing of Him as love that He loves all men.
1 Tim 2:4 “But God desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth”
In the training, the Lord made me realise that I was so short in this matter of knowing God’s universal love. The reason that we do not preach the gospel or are scared to preach the gospel is due to a shortage of our experience of God as love.
Most of the time it is because we love ourselves more that we do not want to lose our face to talk to people.
My excuse has always been that I’m not an eloquent speaker but the best preachers are not those who are the most eloquent in their speech but those who express God’s love through them.
Oh, how we need God to continually soak and saturate us to such an extent that we would not withhold the gospel to all men!
