God's Unending Love and Desire for Repentance


For the season of Lent I'll be sharing devotions from Grace Lutheran's devotional book: "Forgiven." 

While these devotions are not my words and may not represent my own faith or theological understanding, they are valuable personal faith perspectives of 40 of Grace's members and I am so grateful for their generosity in sharing them.

Part Four: Granting Forgiveness & Renewing or Releasing the Relationship

Malachi 3:6-7 (God’s unending love and desire for repentance)

For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished. Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, “How shall we return?”

God's mind is absolutely undivided. This means that His sovereignty can never be separated from His love; His grace cannot be separated from His omniscience; His judgment cannot be separated from either His mercy or His wrath. God is absolutely constant because His faithful providence cannot be separated from any other of His attributes. God is whole and complete. Under every circumstance, He is never confused or uncertain about what to do. He is always headed in the same direction, which is to complete His purpose.

It is absolutely impossible for Him to do anything that is not wise and at the same time loving. It is He who tells us how to live and how to be like Him. What God is has awesome ramifications for us because we are so different, and He wants us to be like Him, to be one with Him, to be whole, to be complete, to be undivided in mind like Him.
Becoming this way requires a measure of cooperation from us. Compared to God, our minds are all over the place, and thus we are so easily distracted from our focus. We need to come back to Him and be grateful and aware of how blessed we are by his infinite mercy.  Know that the Lord never changes in his love for us!

 Prayer:
Oh, Lord, please give us strength to try and live our lives more in your ways.  Thank you for always being a loving and gracious God. 
Amen 

~ Joyce 

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