SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

“God Wants You” is the theme of our upcoming meeting with Ron Nelson. It is the grandest theme of all.  If God is Love (I John 4.8), and if love needs an object, we are that object.  God loves us (John 3.16). God wants us to be saved (II Peter 3.9). God’s dearest dream is to gather His children home to Him (Isaiah 43.1-7).

          Gods-love  In order to bring us home He will do extraordinary things – things that to the human mind seem irrational – not that we think much about these things. God’s love for us is so clearly communicated, so universally experienced that we take for granted it is the most natural thing in the world. It is, because Love is from God, and God made the world. But the Love God has for us is bigger than our brains can decipher, bigger than our hearts can contain.

            To communicate that love He has to tell us stories. Love cannot be dissected in a treatise like a corpse on a coroner’s table. It doesn’t yield to outlines, or bullet points, or power point. Love sings its secrets in songs and stories. God gives us Psalm 23, Psalm 63, Psalm 131. God tells the  prophet Hosea* to fall in love with a promiscuous woman, to marry her, build a family with her, to be cuckolded by her, and to take her back (buy her back from the slavery of prostitution) – all so  the prophet can empathize with God and share that empathy with us. What do we know when we empathize with God? We know that we are the faithless wife, and we know that despite everything God desperately wants us back. Therefore, behold, I will romance her, and bring her to the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her (Hosea 2.14).

            God gives us a story about a lost son (Luke 15). But first He creates empathy in our hearts by telling us a story about a man who loses a lamb, and a woman who loses a coin. We all know what it is to do irrational things when we are looking for something we cannot find. Then, when our hearts are open, He tells the story of a younger son who gets impatient waiting for his father to die so he can receive his inheritance and asks for it early. He tells us of a father who irrationally (to us) gives the son the money, and lets him go away. We know that He is that father and we are that son.  We understand clearly the logic of the son when, impoverished, he seeks only to be a servant if he could only be home. We are able, then, to experience the sensory-grace-overload when the father embraces the son, and welcomes him home as a son.

            God wants us. So much so that He publicly, painfully sacrificed self for us. There is no grander theme. So please come celebrate God’s love for us during our meeting this coming week.

*Steve Gaudreau is currently teaching Hosea in the Wednesday night auditorium class. He is really bringing the text to life. I hope you will come joint that study as well.

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