Finding Hope in God's Love

Mission & Values: Find Hope. Find Community. Find Purpose.

We're continuing our journey through the mission and values of Mt. Olive Commerce, learning about who we are to better understand the calling God has placed on our hearts. Our mission is this: We exist to help people find hope in Jesus, find community in faith and life, and find their purpose through God's calling. 

This past Sunday, we talked about the second Find Hope value statement: We Find Hope in God's Love. The full value statement reads: We seek to be a safe place for the hurting and broken, where God's restoration is real, hope is renewed, and no one is left out.

God is a relational God. We can't talk about hope through God's love without understanding what it looks like to have a relationship with Him. And we can't be a place where people find hope through God's love without knowing how the church should relate to the community the same way God relates to us. Love demands relationship. To find hope in God's love means to understand and reflect God's relationship with us.

God Sees You

God knows where we are, who we are, and the choices we make. Throughout Scripture, God consistently sees people in their brokenness, sin, and suffering, and He responds with compassion. God knows when we sit and when we lie down. He knew us in the womb and formed us according to His image. He knows the number of hairs on our heads. Scripture tells us He is near to the brokenhearted, and calls those saved through Jesus His children.

These aren't descriptions of a distant, detached God. This is a God who loves each individual deeply and who sees us exactly where we are, even in our sin. He doesn't just grieve our disobedience; He grieves the brokenness within us that led to it. Because God sees past the brokenness to the person beneath, to the person He created, the person He chose, the person He loves.

Wherever you are, whatever you're going through, no matter how much you've failed or how much you dislike yourself. No matter what you've been through, the hatred or violence you've endured. No matter how far away you think God's love is...

God sees you. And God loves you.

You were created in the image of God, and because of that you are worth loving.

Stop hiding or pretending before God. Bring your honesty and your brokenness to Him, because you can trust His love to meet you where you are.

And if we're living the kind of love God shows us, then we need to be the kind of people who see the broken and hurting around us and love them the way God loves them. If we want to share our hope with the community, we need to learn to love the lost the way God does, and that begins by seeing them the way God does.

God Chooses You

God not only sees us, but He sees us as worthy of having a relationship with Him. This is what the entire story of the Bible is about from Genesis to Revelation. It's about how God initiated, executed, and completed a plan to return us into relationship with Him.

Romans 5:8 says it plainly: "But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us."

Think about the arc of Scripture: In the beginning, God created us in His image to live in perfect relationship with Him. When sin broke that relationship, God didn't abandon us. From that very moment, He began a plan to solve the sin problem. He worked on humanity's hearts from a distance, preparing us to receive the Savior. When we were ready, God sent His Son to live sinlessly in our place, to take our sins upon Himself, and to pay the ultimate penalty for our disobedience. And then Jesus defeated death, thus defeating sin. Now He stands as our substitute before the Father, so that through a relationship with Jesus we can have a renewed relationship with God.

God didn't have to do any of that. He could have wiped humanity out and started over. But He didn't. We can have hope in God's love because He chooses a relationship with us.

Wherever you are today, God not only sees you, but He sees you as someone He wants to have a relationship with. He knows you and wants to live life with you. You may not realize it, but it's the relationship your soul has been craving.

You don't have to do anything to earn this. God gives it freely. You don't have to be good enough, because Jesus did that for you. You don't have to be clean, because Jesus is clean for you. You can come as you are, and God will welcome you into His arms.

We don't have to do things to get to God, because God did everything to get to us.

When that relationship is real in our lives, we begin to see that God desires a relationship with all of humanity. It doesn't make sense that God works in our lives through relationship and we expect the church to work in the lives of others through programming! If relationship is God's means of interacting with us, then relationship should be our means of interacting with others.

God Restores You

God's work doesn't stop when the relationship is restored. The Bible tells us we become a new creation. God created each person with a unique design and a unique calling. When our relationship with God is restored, He begins the process of helping us understand and become what He originally created us to be.

There's a universal longing for purpose and meaning in every human heart, a desire to become more and experience more than this life can provide. We feel like we were created for more because we were created for more. But sin caused us to lose the identity and purpose God created us to have.

We find meaning, identity, and restoration to who we were created to be when we find a relationship with God. Nothing else satisfies. Our hope is fulfilled through God's love as He transforms and restores us to what He intended when He formed us in the womb. But if you short-circuit the process of hope through God's love, you stall in understanding how God created you. You can only truly understand yourself when you begin to understand God. Because you were created in God's image, to know who you're supposed to be means you have to study the image of God.

If you're struggling with identity and purpose, if you're struggling with a sense of meaning, know that you can have all those things but they can only come through God, not through the self. You long for them because God put that longing in you, but it's a longing to God, not away from Him. We become who we were created to be when we surrender who we think we're supposed to be by the world's standards.

Your Challenge: Experience and Share God's Love

Have you found hope in God's love?

You don't really have hope until you've experienced God's love in your life. God's love is not impersonal or academic, it is real, present, and relational. When you have God's love in your life and walk in relationship with the God of the universe, that spills out into the relationships around you.

• If you need hope: God sees you right where you are. He never asked you to clean yourself up first, He only asked you to come to Him. He chose you for a relationship because He sees the real you behind the sin and brokenness. He wants to restore you to your created design.

• If you have hope: Those around you need us to love them the way God loves us. We shouldn't ask them to clean up first, we should just love them where they are. It's not our job to create transformation. That's God's job. Our job is to show them that the love of God is a love worth having.

  
  

Come to Him. Come to Him if you need hope. Come to Him because He chose to send Jesus to die for your sins. Come to Him because He wants you to have your true life. Hope only comes from Jesus. Your life doesn't really begin until you have that hope.

Learn more from Pastor Keven's sermon: We Find Community in Life Together.