No Higher Love
Good Morning Friends,
I was named after my grandfather John Francis Clark. By his chair, at his home, was a Bible and on the wall of his kitchen a huge poster of the planets in our solar system. He was the seventh son of a seventh son…an inventor, a farmer, a builder and businessman. For the most part life smiled on him. He always had stories he told and challenges of the mind to amaze us as we grew up in a small coal mining town in Southern Illinois. He was charismatic and engaging and entertaining and successful. As a nine year old boy, when I heard he had died, I curled up on a couch in front of a plate glass window at our home next door to my grandparent’s home.
Here the glass captured the winter sun and warmed us even on a cold day. I tried to make sense of it all. He had been is such pain. Pancreatic cancer was so terrible. But now his hospital bed was empty. As I contemplated his passing, my mind and consciousness were drawn to the light of the sun and its warmth shining through the glass. Was this where my grandfather’s spirit had gone? I followed the light outward and upward as I sought a remnant of my grandfather… as I sought God. The beauty of the experience was that it was as if God was praying for me as I searched for this place of No Higher Love.
Scripture: As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is [God’s] love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
Psalm 103:11-12 (NIV)
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:31-39 (NRSV)
Message: Developing a relationship with God is so important. Developing a relationship with others as well. So many get it all backwards, seeking a purpose before the relationship. That is not the nature of love. Friends, we were created by a loving God. We were made to have relationships with God and others forged in the love of the Creator. On the day of my grandfather’s death I discovered that there was nothing to figure out. One only had to have faith that God would love us through it all and be in it all forever. The hope, the living hope, the hope against hope is outside the box. Here God is always working for our good…for our future in heaven…for our future glorified for eternity. Friends, God is for us not against us.
Pray we risk enough to seek out relationships of love. Pray we fear nothing but God. Pray that in these relationships we find purpose. Pray in the rich love of a God who has no boundaries. Pray that we would accept and experience the love of God. Pray we understand the heights and depths of God’s love now and forever.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 