Westside Church of Christ

Nothing warms the human heart quite like the realization that The Lord loves us. It is really quite amazing that the Creator of the universe even knows who we are. We study the planets, sun, moon, and stars; and marvel at the enormity of it all. How could He possibly care about tiny specks like us when He has an infinite number of universes to maintain? Yet, He does. After all, He is God.

John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse in the Bible. We learn it by heart at a very early age. Brianna was a little girl with a face full of freckles who lived behind a pair of extremely thick glasses. Her mom was a totally disinterested Jew and her dad was an atheist, so her home life had zero religion of any sort, but her parents let her come to Bible study and worship with us anyway. She was extremely excited one Sunday morning to let us know from the back seat of the car that she had learned that famous verse. “For God so loved the world,” she began, “that He gave His only forgotten Son…” Funny, yes, and painfully close to the truth far more often than we care to think.

Unfortunately, God and His only begotten Son have been shoved out of the public conversation. Faith in Christ is mocked. Schools do not teach the sanctity of life. Political debates revolve around the right to end human life before it is even born. It all began with a big bang and will end with a hopeless whimper. The notion of an all-powerful, knowing, and loving Creator is dismissed as the thinking of the uneducated. No wonder the world is in such a state of despair.

God loves His creation. He formed us in our mother’s womb. We are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13-16) intentionally at this time for a special reason. We are not the product of a series of evolutionary changes. We are handcrafted by a Lord who loves us so much that He offered His Son in sacrifice for our sins. He knows us better than we know ourselves and deals with individuals within the boundaries of that knowledge. It is all too wonderous to comprehend, but it’s true.

The world is in rebellion. That is nothing new. This same loving Lord flooded the world once because it had become such a mess. He promised that He would not deal with it in that way again, and we are reminded of that each time we see the rainbow. However, forgetting the Father and His Son still brings grave consequences to a culture (Romans 1:18-32). It may not be by water, but the self-destructive ways are obvious. They fill our streets. The God of love is also a God of wrath. We get to choose which side of Him we want to meet in judgment.

Dennis Mayes from Agape will be our speaker Sunday morning for both the Bible class & worship.

Call to praise: James 1:26-27

His Word on it: Isaiah 1:17