"How much does he love me, let me count the ways..."  We have all seen little girls play this game, haven't we?  They pick up a flower to find out if the little boy they are "in love" with loves them back by plucking the petals off of the flower and saying, "He loves me, he loves me not."  And, if the last petal plucked comes when the little girl says, "He loves me!" then it is true love for life!  BUT, if it comes on "He loves me not" she understands why he is playing in a sandbox pretending to be a mutant and not proposing.

We have all kinds of bizarre ways we try to find love.  As we grow up, these ways certainly change, but often are just as effective.  We try to find love in romance, sex, spirituality, friendship, and on and on.  Some of these places have pieces of love in them and often times love can produce romance or friendship.  The love that produces these things may be of a different kind, but at the end of the day, we want to know and feel that someone else cares about us and desires us to care about them.

As we get into a new sermons series on the book of I John, we will find that, though many of the ways we try and find love may be good, they will not help us know true love.  Our efforts to find love are in vein if they do not get us to God, who is love.  And, remarkably, we cannot get to that God by our efforts.  And this is a great thing!  We do not have to work hard or go through difficult relational drama or pluck petals to find out if God loves us.  No, God loves us too much for that.  God, instead, GIVES His love to us in Jesus Christ.  He does not wait for us to find it, He does not have a hidden path we must follow to get to His love.  He seeks us out, He comes to us, He pursues our hearts and makes them His own.  And He does this all through the work of His Son, Jesus Christ. He demonstrated His love for us in this, while we were yet sinners (looking for love in all the wrong places), Christ died for us! (Romans 5:8) And now, through the Holy Spirit, God has sought us out to give us this love won for us on the cross.

How much does He love you?  With an unending, undying love that sacrifices everything in order to have you in a saving relationship with Him.  Don't pluck petals, look to the cross to see the love that God has for you!   It is my prayer that as we get into this new series, you will be built up, transformed, and encouraged by the love that God has for you in Christ Jesus.