Now He commands me to show the same love to others by saying, “…love one another as I have loved you” ( John 15:12). And the Holy Spirit reveals to me that God loved me not because I was lovable, but because it was His nature to do so. The first thing God does is forcibly remove any insincerity, pride, and vanity from my life. But then we must practice the things mentioned in 2 Peter 1 to see them worked out in our lives. Initially, when “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit” ( Romans 5:5), it is easy to put Jesus first. Love is the loftiest preference of one person for another, and spiritually Jesus demands that this sovereign preference be for Himself (see Luke 14:26). But it is not a gate we pass right through it is one where we abide in the life that is found there.Love is an indefinite thing to most of us we don’t know what we mean when we talk about love. It is the gate through which any and every individual can enter into oneness with God. The Cross is not the cross of a man, but the Cross of God, and it can never be fully comprehended through human experience. The Cross is the central event in time and eternity, and the answer to all the problems of both. God came in the flesh to take sin away, not to accomplish something for Himself. The purpose of the incarnation was redemption.

Beware of separating “ God was manifested in the flesh…” from “… He made Him… to be sin for us…” ( 1 Timothy 3:16 2 Corinthians 5:21). The incarnation of Christ would have no meaning without the Cross. He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” ( Revelation 13:8). The Cross was not something that happened to Jesus- He came to die the Cross was His purpose in coming. He made redemption the foundation of human life that is, He made a way for every person to have fellowship with God. There is nothing in time or eternity more absolutely certain and irrefutable than what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross- He made it possible for the entire human race to be brought back into a right-standing relationship with God. It was the supreme triumph, and it shook the very foundations of hell. Never associate the idea of martyrdom with the Cross of Christ. The Cross of Christ is the revealed truth of God’s judgment on sin. Read previous Oswald Chamber Devotionals here …who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree… - 1 Peter 2:24 My Utmost For His Highest Devotional For Ap: Topic – The Collision of God and Sin

Oswald chambers devotional