2/15/2017 2:30:29 PM
Love Restored
If you’ve ever met with a group of friends to play a game that involves teams, you know that you’ve got to divide everyone up. So what do you do? Well there are a lot of ways to make teams, but I bet what you probably do is boys versus girls, right? It’s that old contest: who’s better the boys or the girls. I would like to submit to you today that when we do that, we are admitting something about our natural state of sinfulness: boys and girls don’t always want to play nicely together. Now I’m not saying teams of boys vs. girls are wrong, I’m saying I think it illustrates a portion of our human nature.
Of course, God never intended life to be “boys vs. girls.” God intended boys and girls to help one another, to partner together. God intended boys and girls to marry and become not just friends but intimate companions in this world whose relationship would form the foundation of society. What God says about boys and girls is that he made them to be each other’s companions and not just companions but as husband and wife, intimate companions.
We look back on that with wonder because we know how different things are today: broken and hurting marriages. How sad! It seems at times that life really is “boys vs. girls” with each side viewing the other as their adversary. You’ve got “women’s rights” and “chauvinism”; women and men abusing each other. What has happened to that perfect companionship? It's sin. But worse than that, it's sinful people like you and me. And we are sinful because of a broken and failed relationship between us and God.
But God was not willing to be the spouse left out in the cold--forgotten and abandoned. He fought his way back into our lives by destroying the sin that separated us from him in the first place. He did it by joining the human race in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus destroyed the wall of sin by bashing it down with the cross. The cross was the perfect weapon to destroy sin because on it Jesus was punished in your place for sin; and not only that but his perfect life of perfect companionship with God and other people was turned over to you and covers your life of sin. So nothing stands between you and God anymore. The relationship has been restored through Christ. We can love him now because he loved us even when we were his enemies.
And if sinners and a holy God can be restored, then the love between boys and girls, the love between man and woman, the love between a husband and a wife--all love, even your love, can be restored.