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- ❤️ First Love Weekly #20: The Father's Heart
❤️ First Love Weekly #20: The Father's Heart
Weekly post about God in the daily with encouragements from the Word
Jae Leeholland
June 16, 2024
In honor of Father's Day today, I felt inspired to write about our Father’s heart for us, which He vulnerably laid out in plain sight in Isaiah 43.
In Isaiah, He speaks:
4 Since you are precious and honored in my sight,
and because I love you,
I will give people in exchange for you,
nations in exchange for your life.
5 Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.
18 Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
20 [...] to give drink to my people, my chosen,
the people I formed for myself
that they may proclaim my praise.
24 […] But you have burdened me with your sins
and wearied me with your offenses.
25 I, even I, am He who blots out
your transgressions, for my own sake,
and remembers your sins no more.
26 Review the past for me,
let us argue the matter together;
state the case for your innocence.
This is God speaking to the Israelites, who were banished into exile and subjected to oppression for all the unspeakable sins they committed in defiance.
But even in the midst of all this, you can see God’s heart for His children in the words He spoke with compassion.
He loves us. He loves to the point that He’d exchange nations for our lives.
He says He’s tirelessly at work to breathe life into our lives so we can move on from our past and walk into His presence. Why? He ultimately wants us to share in His joy and glory. Because we know, praising God has the power of bringing heaven on earth.
Last but not least— and this I still cannot fathom— He expresses His desire to be with us above all. He’ll even go the distance to erase our sins, because He cannot bear to have it sit between us and Him. In verse 26, God pleads us to work with Him to state the case of our innocence.
Can you believe this? His love for us is so great that He’d implore us to approach Him with our memories of rebellion and filth. God does not keep us at a distance for all we’ve done; no, it’s quite the opposite.
In fact, you and I know, He couldn’t bear the pain of being separated from us and displayed the greatest form of love by doing the following:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).
On this beautiful Father’s Day, let us celebrate and praise our Father in heaven who loves us to death— quite literally. For by Him, with Him, through Him, and in Him, we are able to live this life in peace, love, and joy: the eternal states of being that transcend all understanding.
With love,
Jae
“You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” (Revelation 2:3-5)
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