Carry Me to the Deep

We Love, because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19

I want to encourage you to reflect on this verse. Read it slowly, read it out loud.

We love…

because…

He FIRST….

loved us.

As I flipped my calendar to February this morning this beautiful verse was staring me down. As I read and re-read, I began to ponder do we really grasp this truth?  It is only in Him that we are able to love or show love.

I remember reading a quote that appropriately describes this kind of love.

Our love to him is like a trickling rill, speeding its way to the ocean because it first came from the Ocean. All the rivers run into the sea, but their floods first arose from it: the clouds that were exhaled from the mighty main distilled in showers and filled the water-brooks. Here was their first cause and prime origin; and, as if they recognized the obligation, they pay tribute in return to the parent source. The ocean love of God, so broad that even the wing of imagination could not traverse it, sends forth its treasures of the rain of grace, which drop upon our hearts, which are as the pastures of the wilderness; they make our hearts to overflow, and in streams of gratitude the life imparted flows back again to God. All good things are of thee, Great God; thy goodness creates our good; thine infinite love to us draws forth our love to thee. ~ C. H. Spurgeon

Can you imagine it with me? The ocean waves rushing towards the beach, the tide rising and covering the sand, only to return back to the deep?

That is love. GOD IS LOVE. 1 John 4:8

Our LOVE our SOURCE is God.

His love, the depths of his love, are deeper than the ocean deeps.

We can listen to sermon after sermon; complete bible study after bible study; study, memorize, gain knowledge, and read every book in the library but, “Without love you remain in ignorance still, ignorance of the unhappiest and ruinous kind. “C.H. Spurgeon

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Let’s take time to have a heart check. 

Let’s stop running and going a hundred miles a minute and examine ourselves. 

Do you love God? 

Do you think you have to earn his love?

Have you drifted from adoring Him?

Do you believe he only loves you if…?

“Every man that ever was saved had to come to God not as a lover of God, but as a sinner, and to believe in God's love to him as a sinner. God has love in his heart towards those who have nothing in them to love. He loves you, poor soul, who feel that you are most unlovable; loves you who mourn over a stony heart, which will not warm or melt with love to him. Thus saith the Lord: "I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins; return unto me; for I have redeemed thee." O that God's gracious voice this morning might so call some of his poor wandering ones that they may come and believe his love to them, and then cast themselves at his feet to be his servants forever.

"God loves me-not merely bears with me, thinks of me, feeds me, but loves me….an insignificant nobody, full of sin-who deserved to be in hell; who loves him so little in return-God loves me. Beloved believer, does not this melt you? Does not this fire your soul?” C.H. Spurgeon 

GOD LOVES YOU! Not because of anything YOU DID. Not because you earned it. But because HE IS LOVE. He sent his one and only son to die for your sins. He SAVES and LOVES sinners. And only then can we have and experience true love from the author and creator. Have you drifted today? Do you need to dive into the deep? The source of love? Rediscover what he did for you? 

Let that love transform you.